neat way of parsing delimited list of strings...

[Krisjanis Gale <Krisjanis.Gale@NY.FRB.ORG>]

necessity is the mother invention.
working on an SQR that parses values
in a table and then generates an SQR that
acts on those values (don't ask!  it's ugly what
i'm doing!) i ran into the problem of not having
an easy way to pull strings from a comma-delimited
string, one by one.
so i decided to "make it so."
here's a working SQR ditty that does just
what i thought it would.
it first counts the number of words in the string ($S),
then lists them invidually.
perhaps some of you will find this useful.

--

begin-program
let $S = 'this,is,a,comma,delimited,string'
let $S = $S || ',@'
let $tmp = $S
let $head = ''
let #wordcount = 0
while $tmp <> '@'
  let #pos = instr($tmp,',',1)
  let $tmp = substr($tmp,#pos+1,length($tmp)-#pos)
  let #wordcount = #wordcount + 1
end-while
display #wordcount
let $tmp = $S
let $head = ''
while $tmp <> '@'
  let #pos = instr($tmp,',',1)
  let $head = substr($tmp,1,#pos - 1)
  display $head
  let $tmp = substr($tmp,#pos+1,length($S)-#pos)
end-while
end-program

--


(kris)janis p. gale
hrsd - federal reserve bank of new york
x8163