MatchText, MatchChunk and the needle in the haystack

[Jim Ault]

On 3/19/07 10:49 AM, "Bryan McCormick" <bryan at deepfoo.com> wrote:

> Dave,
> 
> Sadly it does not impact the outcome. Mind you I tried it just in case.
> 
> I have played with all the vars that I can think of and it does nothing.
> It does not even appear to matter (as I thought) if there are multiple
> months (i.e "-Jan-") of the same type in a row (thought it might be
> finding the first and missing the others somehow, but no), it doesn't
> matter if the date is of xx-Month-xx, or x-Month-XX, nor does it matter
> the order or how often these appear in the string and it doesn't seem to
> matter how long or short the record or the file happens to be.
> 
> It should work as far as I can see. I am stumped at this point. It is an
> error for sure (on my end) it is just really subtle it seems. Or it will
> be until someone points the magic finger and says "here it is you idiot"!

A couple ideas 

-1--- make sure that you are not changing the length of the textBlock with
replacements.  This could accumulate to a significant offset error,
depending on how you build your loops.

-2--- test for null chars [00  ascii] used in some file formats
put length(textBlock) into origCharCnt
replace null with empty
answer  length(textBlock) - origCharCnt

-3--- do inspections to see if something is creating a false hit or false
miss....

put the number of lines in textBlock into foundMth

repeat <for each month string, -Jan-, -Feb-, etc.>
   replace "-Jan-" with cr &"Jan-" in textBlock
   get the number of lines in textBlock - sum(foundMth)
   put it &","after foundMth
   breakpoint
--now inspect the textBlock & foundMth for any odd occurrences

-- optional is to    filter textBlock without "*Jan-" thus purging as you go

end repeat


Jim Ault
Las Vegas