returning result from a function when the number of items in the result varies

[Stephen Barncard]

You've practically designed it!

Arrays are your friend.


{ below not tested}

function yourFunction arrayVar
put Timestamp & tab & "FDSFSDF" into myArray[garbage]
put "toad" into myArray[green]
return myArray
end yourFunction

put yourFunction() into  Array

combine array with return and tab
put Array

-->
garbage<tab>20080923<tab>FDSFSDF
green<tab>toad




To get the number of elements in an array:
number of lines in myArray

even better ( I love this one - think binary):
repeat for each line tKey in the keys of tArray
   put tArray[tKey] & return after tArrayContents
end repeat


to sort:
  put the keys of myArray into myVariable
   sort lines of myVariable



>I'm having trouble sorting this out. I have a function that searches through
>lines of tab delimited text. The number of lines varies from one to ten. The
>result from the search is two things. A data element and a pointer that says
>which kind of data element. Sometimes the result is one data element and one
>pointer and sometimes the result is another quantity like three data
>elements each with their identifier. To have this returned by the function
>it seems I need an array. I'm inexperienced at using arrays but I imagine
>that you just build it in the function and that is what is returned and then
>the identifiers for each data element are the keys and it makes no
>difference how many lines are in the array? Perhaps I also return a counter
>which says how many lines of data are in the array?

-- 


stephen barncard
s a n  f r a n c i s c o
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