Search a string

[victorf]

Suppose I have a string, say S1 and a second string S2 and I wish to search S2 character by character to see if any character in S1 is in S2 and return the position of that character in S2, i.e. S1 = ",*" and S2 contains "ABC,DEF*". I want to search S2 character by character and when the comma is detected the function returns 4 and when the search reaches the star the function returns 8. I believe this is equivalent to the VB InStr function. I want to be able to write something like:

[dkinzer]

One way to implement this functionality is to use the StrFind() function. I can't say offhand whether it would likely be more efficient to search the subject string up to N times using a single character string created from successive characters of the separator character string or vice versa. My conjecture, assuming that the subject string will generally be longer than the string of separator characters, is that the former would be more efficient.

[dkinzer]

[victorf]

All I want to do is to extract the values delimited by either character in S1
Can I do the following:

[twesthoff]

Vic,
Would you post a sample string please? It will make it easier to find a solution.

Are the two delimiters "*" and "," always in the same order or relative position in each string? If so then there may be more efficient ways to solve the problem.

Are we to assume that each large string is a different length?

Tom

[dlh]

Vic,

I think you need to supply more info. It looks like you want something similar to the VB Parse function (introduced with VB5?) but with two different delimiters.

Are you trying to extract the characters between the comma and asterisk?

If so, it probably will be easier to do it in multiple steps.

1. Find the comma
2. Find the asterisk
3. Extract the characters between them

[victorf]

Tom

OK,

Suppose you have a string S1:

S1 = "ABC,DEF,GHI,JKL;RST;UVW;XYZ"

and the string S2

S2 = ",;"

with the user specified string separators, i.e. comma and semi-comma in this case, in S2

I want to write a function to search for any such separator in S1 and extract the characters between the separators, i.e.

ABC
DEF
GHI
JKL
RST
UVW
XYZ

and place them in a user specified BYREF array. The function will return the number of sub-strings found or -1 if none are found.

I have this function in VB but it uses the VB function InStr like this:

[dlh]

One thing missing (I think) in the ZBasic implementation of Mid is...

s = Mid("ABC,DEF*", 5)

which returns "DEF*". It simplifies this type of operation. Of course, there's a work-around using Right but that's not quite as readable.

[victorf]

This is the day for mistakes. When I wrote my last post I goofed:

[dlh]

[twesthoff]

Vic,
The Zbasic FindStr() does the same thing as Instr() so your VB code should work with little modification using FindStr().

I don't think there is any way in Zbasic to REDIM an array, so you will have to make it big enough to handle the largest items you expect.

There is more than one way to do what you want, so I am sure you can get it to work. Dlh had a good idea in a previous post...
Tom

[dkinzer]

Several months ago, I posted some code for splitting a string using a single delimiter string. It could be modified to treat the delimiter string as multiple possible delimiters as you required. Note, also, that my function is designed to be called repeatedly, if necessary, to completely process the string. This capability works around the potential problem caused by the lack of re-dim capability and still handles strings with a large number of sub-elements.