SCOUG-Programming Mailing List Archives

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Date:	Thu, 17 Sep 1998 20:34:07 PDT
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: Calling all REXX programmings

Content Type: text/plain

> > Is there a clean way to collect all of the
> > numeric data from a string. For example, given:
> > abc123def456ghi
> > I want
> > 123456

I should have also mentioned that, if you want to eliminate _every_
character except 0..9, use XRANGE() to generate your inline string.

For ASCII display characters:

st = 'abc123def456ghi'
say space( translate( st, '', xrange(' ','/') || xrange(':','~')),
0)

or, for all binary characters,

st = 'abc123def456ghi'
say space( translate( st, '', xrange('00'x,'2f'x) ||
xrange('3a'x,'ff'x)), 0)

How it works: XRANGE() generates a string of characters
('abcdefghij...') that you don't want. The concatenation ("||") puts
the XRANGE() character strings together. Then TRANSLATE() replaces
those characters with spaces. Finally, SPACE(,0) removes all the
spaces.

It looks terrifying, but it's faster than a Rexx loop. If you're
concerned about readability, the following is the same code but
unrolled, and is also faster than a Rexx loop:

st = 'abc123def456ghi'
/* Generate string of unwanted characters. */
st1 = xrange('00'x,'2f'x) || xrange('3a'x,'ff'x)
/* Replace unwanted characters with spaces. */
st2 = translate( st, '', st1)
/* Remove all spaces. */
say space( st2, 0)

- Perfesser Pete

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