Stripping a string except...

[Louis Nickerson]

The following is an example of a string I am working with.

ABC Prospect1234 5th StreetVero Beach~7333

I need to strip everything except the numbers that follow the tilda "~" symbol.

The number following the ~ could be any length, so the str, left and right functions do not seem to me to be viable solutions.

Thanks

Louis

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Stripping a string except...

Louis, why not?

Assuming there will always only be one tilde in each string... you could

use len() and trim() to get the trimmed string length;
use at() to get the position of the tilde;
subtract the position from the length and you get the number of chars to extract using substr().

Alpha's string functions are great.

This hasn't been tested but you'd wind up with something like this:

ltrim(substr(your_string_name, AT("~", your_string_name) +1 , len(trim(substr(your_string_name)) - AT("~", your_string_name)))

-- tom

[Louis Nickerson]

RE: Stripping a string except...

Got It!

For those whom are interested...

AT()found the location of the ~
Substr() gave me the number following the ~

Louis

[Louis Nickerson]

RE: Stripping a string except...

Tom,

I think we were typing our replys at the same time.

I got it working, but your idea sounds even better. I'll give it a go and let you know how it turns out.


Thanks

Louis

[Stan Mathews]

RE: Stripping a string except...

And the right() function can perform the same magic.

test = "ABC Prospect1234 5th StreetVero Beach~7333 "
rem = right(alltrim(test),len(alltrim(test))-at("~",test))
? rem
= "7333"

or if your "~" is always the rightmost 4 significant characters

rem = right(alltrim(test),4)

[Stan Mathews]

RE: Stripping a string except...

Meant to say

or if your numbers after the "~" are always the rightmost 4 significant characters

[PhilD]

RE: Stripping a string except...

Since this is along the same lines as what I need to do I thought I would ask this here. How would you strip a string like this?

test = "C:\Data\Alpha5 Databases\AlphaTestDogs\Images\default.jpg"

rem = right(alltrim(test),len(alltrim(test))-at("\",test))
ERROR: Expected value

?rem

If I put a \ I get the error. I can use a . and just get the file extension jpg.


What I eventually want to do is get the image filename from an image file reference field and place just the name of the photo in another field named imagefile. This would be so I can verify that the photo is correct for the record.

Thanks

Phil

[Keith Hubert]

RE: Stripping a string except...

Phil,

As there would be so many substrings I feel it would be better if you use the Update Operation. Where you can split a string in to a number of fields at the point of the "\".

Keith Hubert
London.

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Stripping a string except...

Phil,

you're working with a special case.

The backslash is the line continuation symbol in Alpha Five. Try substituting chr(92) for the backslash.

AND, there's a new method for the FILE object in Vers. 5. Check the docs on:

File.filename_parse()

-- tom

[Stan Mathews]

RE: Stripping a string except...

The backslash is also the "escape" character for quote marks, so in the at("\",test), it is getting interpreted incorrectly. You merely need to escape the escape character like:

test = "C:\Data\Alpha5 Databases\AlphaTestDogs\Images\default.jpg"

rem = right(alltrim(test),len(alltrim(test))-at("\\",test))

? rem
= "Data\Alpha5 Databases\AlphaTestDogs\Images\default.jpg"

That said, the other options of filename_parse() are likely easier to use.

[PhilD]

RE: Stripping a string except...

I thought what I wanted was a special case, most of what I want seems to be.

I tried the file.filename_parse(filename,"n") and looks as if I get what I want. I'll experment with everyones ideas some today at work if I have time.

[code]test = "C:\Data\Alpha5 Databases\AlphaTestDogs\Images\default.jpg"
?file.filename_parse(test,"n")
= "default"

I learned somethng, Thanks

Phil

[Lenny Forziati]

RE: Stripping a string except...

Even simpler would be the word() function. As it takes an optional parameter to specify word boundaries, all you would need to do is:

?word("ABC Prospect1234 5th StreetVero Beach~7333 ",1,"~")
= "ABC Prospect1234 5th StreetVero Beach"


-Lenny

[Edward Larrabee]

RE: Stripping a string except...

cc = "ABC Prospect1234 5th StreetVero Beach~7333"
dd = left(cc, at("~",cc)-1)
? dd = "ABC Prospect1234 5th StreetVero Beach"