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

[Alex Tweedly]

Raymond E. Griffith wrote:

>>Alex Tweedly wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>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.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Hmmm. Since L is a separate chunk each time (a single Line), I don't know
>why it won't work. 
>
The code fragment above does work - that's my working but 
inefficient/large version.

What fails is the one-liner using
   get the number of lines in item 1 to itemOffset(tNeedle, tData) in tData

That fails because of the CR-within-item issue.

>There is also a "filter" pData with pitem -- but you'd need to put pData
>into a temporary variable since it eliminates the rest of the data list
>except for the line it finds. It also has the the ability to use simple
>regex arguments in the filter.
>  
>
As far as I can see, the filter expressions are not capable of 
identifying items within a line, they're just too far short of proper 
regex, so 'filter' can't be used. If there is a way to do it, please let 
me know.

Regex can do it easily enough, so there is the option of

>   put "[,^](" & pID & ")[,$]" into tRegex
>   put matchChunk(pData, tRegex, t1, t2) into t
>   if t then
>      get the number of lines in char 1 to t2 of pData
>   else
>     get 0
>   end if
>
I'm not sure if that is much easier or as readily understandable as the 
longer scripted version - but it's probably faster.

or Robert suggested the alternative of adding extra itemDelimiters at 
the start and end of each line in the data structure, which would be a 
confusing but feasible way to do it.

Thanks everyone - I now have a few ways to do it; I'll stick to the 
scripted version for maintainability, and if performance becomes an 
issue I'll benchmark the regex method and the additional delimiter 
version and see which wins.

Thanks
-- Alex.
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