blank spaces in a phone number

[ken]

How can i eliminate blank spaces within a phone number
such as:

+49 40 377 415 --" +4940377415
+380 4877 23089 --" +380487723089

Regards,
Corneliu

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

You could parse the string into two pieces.
Put the plus symbol in the first part.
Use remspecial() to remove the blanks from the second part.
Reassemble the parts into a new string.

-- tom

[Edward Larrabee]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

new_phone_number = stritran(old_phone_number, " ", "")

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

Very nice, Ed. Much easier than what I was thinking of.

-- tom

[ken]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

Thanks a lot. it works great!
Regards,
Corneliu

[Lenny Forziati]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

stritran() does a case-insensitive replacement, while strtran() does a case-sensitive replcement. Allowing for case-insensitivity decreases performance. While in this case the difference in execution speed will be negligible, most people are not aware of this issue and always use stritran() even when they do not need to. I suggest using strtran() instead whenever possible. So in this case, I would use:

new_phone_number = strtran(old_phone_number," ","")

-Lenny

[ken]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

thank you very much for explanation

Regards,
Corneliu

[CALocklin]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

I couldn't help it, I had to do some comparisons. I also noted a possible advantage to Tom's original idea of using remspecial().

With remspecial() all special characters are removed. This means that it will also remove any dashes, parenthesis, etc. that the user may accidentally (or improperly) enter.

Below is my test script. Note the output results and slight speed increase with remspecial(). It's the fastest as well as removing all special characters.

Unfortunately Lenny, this doesn't support your "strtran() is faster than stritran()" theory but the logic to your theory seems correct so I suspect there's something else involved in this case.

stime = now()
FOR qx = 1 to 20000
a = stritran( "+49 (40) 377-415", " ", "" )
NEXT
ui_msg_box( "TIME stritran", ltrim(str(now()-stime,10,3 )) +crlf(2)+ a)
stime = now()
FOR qx = 1 to 20000
a = strtran( "+49 (40) 377-415", " ", "" )
NEXT
ui_msg_box( "TIME strtran", ltrim(str(now()-stime,10,3 )) +crlf(2)+ a)
stime = now()
FOR qx = 1 to 20000
a = "+" + remspecial( "+49 (40) 377-415" )
NEXT
ui_msg_box( "TIME remspecial", ltrim(str(now()-stime,10,3 )) +crlf(2)+ a)

(I'm sure some of you will be saying, "Why 'qx'?" Ask yourself - would you rather search a large script for a variable named 'x' and find 20 bad hits in words like 'text' along with the 3 valid hits or do a search on 'qx' and find only the 3 valid hits? A very wise person once told me that when I thought about making things as easy as possible for myself I should think about making it easy for the long term because making the short term easy often makes the long term more difficult.)

Cal Locklin
www.aimsdc.net

[CALocklin]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

I suppose I should have included the results:

stritran -- .390 seconds -- +49(40)377-415
strtran -- .406 seconds -- +49(40)377-415
remspecial -- .343 seconds -- +4940377415

The times varied a bit but this was about the most common result I saw.

Obviously, time is really not a big factor here but the output results might be.

[csda1]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

Cal,

The resolution of the timer is not enough to be really valid. You need to increase the time so that it is greater than about 2 seconds to be totally valid to reasonable accuraacy.

The other aspect is that in addition to the line of interest, you are executing the loop the same number of times. You need to subtract out an empty loop time to get truly valid values and an approximation of true numbers. Other wise it's only the difference that tells you how much difference the two are, but not how much the total time would really be.

Regards,

Ira

[csda1]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

Using the following, I got 4.828, 2.406 and 2.406 respectively. Stritran does take longer.

Regards,

Ira


Iterate=100000

stime = now()
FOR qx = 1 to Iterate
NEXT
looptime=NOW()-stime

FOR qx = 1 to Iterate
a = stritran( "+49 (40) 377-415", " ", "" )
NEXT
a1=NOW()-stime
a1=a1-looptime
ui_msg_box( "TIME stritran", ltrim(str(a1,10,3 )) +crlf(2)+ a)

stime = now()
FOR qx = 1 to Iterate
a = strtran( "+49 (40) 377-415", " ", "" )
NEXT
a2=NOW()-stime
a2=a1-looptime
ui_msg_box( "TIME strtran", ltrim(str(a2,10,3 )) +crlf(2)+ a)

stime = now()
FOR qx = 1 to Iterate
a = "+" + remspecial( "+49 (40) 377-415" )
NEXT
a3=NOW()-stime
a3=a1-looptime
ui_msg_box( "TIME remspecial", ltrim(str(a3,10,3 )) +crlf(2)+ a)

end

[csda1]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

Slight mistake in above code. The corrected times for the code below are;

Loop overhead is 2.656 seconds
Stritan 5.531 (without loop overhead)
Strtran 2.625 (without loop overhead)
remspecial 2.438 (without loop overhead)


Regards,

Ira

' iteration count � should end up with times " about 5 sec
' or more without being too slow to test
Iterate=100000
msg=""

stime = now()
FOR qx = 1 to Iterate
NEXT
looptime=NOW()-stime
msg=msg+"TIME loop "+" "+ltrim(str(looptime,10,3 ))+CRLF(2)

FOR qx = 1 to Iterate
a = stritran( "+49 (40) 377-415", " ", "" )
NEXT
a1=NOW()-stime
a1=a1-looptime
'ui_msg_box("TIME stritran", ltrim(str(a1,10,3 )) +crlf(2)+ a)
msg=msg+"TIME stritran "+" "+ltrim(str(a1,10,3 ))+"Value="+a+CRLF()

stime = now()
FOR qx = 1 to Iterate
a = strtran( "+49 (40) 377-415", " ", "" )
NEXT
a2=NOW()-stime
a2=a2-looptime
'ui_msg_box( "TIME strtran", ltrim(str(a2,10,3 )) +crlf(2)+ a)
msg=msg+"TIME strtran "+" "+ltrim(str(a2,10,3 ))+"Value="+a+CRLF()

stime = now()
FOR qx = 1 to Iterate
a = "+" + remspecial( "+49 (40) 377-415" )
NEXT
a3=NOW()-stime
a3=a3-looptime
'ui_msg_box( "TIME remspecial", ltrim(str(a3,10,3 )) +crlf(2)+ a)
msg=msg+"TIME remspecial"+" "+ltrim(str(a3,10,3 ))+"Value="+a+CRLF()

ui_msg_box( "TIME",msg)

end

[CALocklin]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

Ira! You left out an "stime = now()" before the Stritran() loop so it is adding the loop time twice. This has a slight (!) tendency to increase the apparent time to run Stritran().

After adding the "stime = now()", I get approximately the same relative results as before - Stritran() takes slightly longer that Strtran().

It still seems like Lenny's comment makes sense so I'd be curious to know why it doesn't seem to be working. I'd play with it more but don't have the time right now. In fact, I shouldn't even be on the board but I just had to "take a rest."

By the way, I did initially use a higher loop number but tried the reduced version and it gave about the same results so I posted that one so others wouldn't get impatient and try to shut it down before it was done.

Cal Locklin
www.aimsdc.net

PS: Now I know why you've seemed to be getting a little crazy lately ... I'm about driven nuts by the long times to save some A5 stuff and to open large folders in Windows Explorer - you must be getting driven right over the edge if you're using that computer for development and it's taking 2.5 times a long. My loop time was only .907 seconds - and I thought my computer was getting out of date.

[csda1]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

Cal,

Right you are about the stime=now().

That explains my confusion of STRITRAN being twice as long as STRTRAN. The numbers are now more in line with my intuition. So, my corrected numbers are

2.516 loop
2.437 stritran
2.484 strtran
2.296 remspecial

But as for the absolute times, I'm running the test with A5V6, Pentium 4, 3 Ghz system, 1 Gig PC3200 memory, 7200RPM Hard Drives. If you are saying I'm running slow, then we should identify the cause of A5 to running slower.

I do have a lot of spyware, anti-virus and other protection software in, but removal doesn't seem to make much of a difference. These shouldn't be the cause, because files are not being accessed or modified/created.

I tried running in Safe mode, but something else has occured in my system, as it just reboots every time I go into safe mode (didn't use to do that). I'd really hate to have to do another reload of Win XP :(

Anyway, if you can explain your numbers and environment, I'll try to ascertain the offending program, and then we can report as an anamoly of A5.

Regards,

Ira

[CALocklin]

RE: blank spaces in a phone number

Other than the fact that mine is a 2.4 Ghz system and I'm not sure what type of memory I have (but it is 1 Gig), our specs are the same.

I have turned off or tweaked a few system settings. Unfortunately, I can't tell you just what they were. Maybe they made more difference than I thought. If you want it, I will send you some of the most likely settings that I may have changed but it would take a lot of detective work to find out which ones have or have not actually been changed on my system. Most of them did not make any detectable difference at the time.

Cal Locklin
www.aimsdc.net