When is a Word not a Word?

[Peter Brigham MD]

On Jan 9, 2011, at 5:48 PM, Peter Haworth wrote:

> Got weird things going on with the wordoffset function.  The code is:
>
> put wordoffset(field "Selection",myLine) into mywordoffset
>
> if field Selection contains xyz and myline contains abc def xyz,  
> then wordoffset returns 3.
>
> if field Selection contains xyz and myline contains abc def  
> "xyz" (xyz in double quotes this time), wordoffset returns zero.
>
> I've tried this with all combinations of casesensitive and  
> wholematches true and false.
>
> According to the dictionary, "A word is delimited by one or more  
> spaces, tabs, or returns, or enclosed by double quotes" so why isn;t  
> "xyz" recognised as a word?
>
> Pete Haworth

Word 3 of
    abc def "xyz"
is
    "xyz"
not
    xyz

The business about "enclosed in double quotes" refers to the (to my  
mind) puzzling convention in RC, dating back to the old HC days, of  
considering anything in double quotes to be one word. So, word 3 of
    abc def "ghi jklmno"
is
    "ghi jklmno"
(with the quotes included). There was a debate about the merits of  
this convention a while back -- search the archives.

But you might have wholematches set to true.

If you do:
    put "abc def ghi" && quote & "xyz" & quote into tSentence
    put "xyz" into tWord
    put s & cr & wordoffset(tWord, tSentence)
then you get
    abc def ghi "xyz"
    4
unless the wholematches = true, in which case the wordoffset returns 0.

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig