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Date:	Sat, 20 Dec 2003 14:08:35 PST8
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: Blair Parses Rexx (was: 2004 Schedule)

Content Type: text/plain

Lynn H. Maxson wrote:
>
> Scheduled for January we have Bob Blair discussing
> REXX programming, specifically the parse operator.

Good, Bob has a lot of experience with Rexx, and Parse is one of Rexx's
assets.

I don't like Parse when Arg may be used instead. However, there are
some tricks which you can use with Parse (for example, use a character
other than a space for the delimiter) which are handy.

When you want the entire command line parameter string rather than the
individual parameters you should remember that the entire command line
ends up in arg(1) so you don't have to reassemble it from the Parsed
components (assuming you want the entire command line). Alternately
the Word() procedure might work better depending on your logic; I use
Word() because my command line parameters might occur in any order and I
need to process them one-at-a-time. And for called procedures the
individual parameters are already in arg(1) arg(2) etc so there's no
need to Parse.

Luckily Bob is way ahead of me and I'm sure he'll have some great tricks
for everyone. Parse can separate a drive letter from the directory path
in one statement and it can also split a time in HH:MM:SS format into
its respective components, again in one statement. It can similarly
speed up the parsing of email header lines, web log data and just about
everything else where you have a bunch of data in a single string with a
known format. I've had a heck of a time writing CONFIG.SYS processing
utilities and Parse with "=" as delimiter might be a good way to
separate a line's keyword from its designated value.

When has anyone needed PARSE VERSION?

- Peter

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