Line offset of an item (and other similar functions).

[Alex Tweedly]

Alex Tweedly wrote:

> J. Landman Gay wrote:
>
>>
>> Like this:
>>
>> get the number of lines in item 1 to itemoffset(tString,tData) of tData
>>
> Thank You !
> I seem to have a mental block against item expressions that cross line 
> boundaries.  My over-structured brain *knows* that items are small 
> things that fit within lines; this is the 3rd or 4th time I've missed 
> something because of that blinkered view.
>
Nope, spoke too soon. That looks convincing, and worked on my initial 
testing - but doesn't actually work properly in all cases.

The problem is that the CRs are included within items - so given data like
a,abc,1
b,def,2
c,qwe,3
etc.,  item 1 is "a", item 2 is "abc", item 3 is "1
b" (i.e. including the cr), item 4 is "def", etc.

Clearly, that means itemOffset will never match what I think of as items 
that are first (or last) on each line.

In the above case, I want to be able to search for the line containing 
item "b" and find the second line.
Currently I'm using

> function findItemAsLineNumber pItem, pData
>   local i, L
>   set wholeMatches to true
>   --  set the itemDel to TAB
>   put 0 into i
>   repeat for each line L in pData
>     add 1 to i
>     if itemOffset(pItem, L) > 0 then return i
>   end repeat
>   return 0
> end findItemAsLineNumber

but I still think there should be an easier (or at least faster, 
shorter, better) way.

-- Alex.


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