The PLOT+ program provides a variety of tools for editing symbol strings. See the PLOT+ Users Guide for further information. The special functions manipulate and reformat character strings.
Note that many of these functions are handled directly by Ferret string functions such as STRINDEX, STRLEN, SUBSTRING, etc
The general format is SET sym $function(arg1, arg2,...). The functions are:
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$EDIT(symbol,argument) |
Edit a symbol: change to uppercase, remove extra blanks, or remove all blanks |
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$EXTRACT(start,length,symbol) |
Extracts selected characters from the input string. |
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$INTEGER(symbol) |
Converts a number to integer format |
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$LENGTH(symbol) |
Returns the length of the input string |
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$LOCATE(substring,symbol) |
Locates a substring in the input string (compares only the first 30 characters of the substring.) |
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$ELEMENT(position,delimiter,symbol) |
Extracts an element from an input string in which the elements are separated by a specified delimiter. |
Example:
yes? DEFINE SYMBOL test = my string
yes? PPL SET upper_test $EDIT(test,COMPRESS)
yes? SHOW SYMBOL upper_test
UPPER_TEST = "my string"