Compare numeric strings with leading zeros

[Ralph DiMola]

Ahhhhhhhhh,

I did not have a chance to read the docs about matchText yet. This why the
uselist is one of the best lists around.

I was trying to avoid another user function but it look like stringsAreEqual
is going in my master library.

Thanks Lyn!

Ralph DiMola
IT Director
Evergreen Information Services
rdimola at evergreeninfo.net


-----Original Message-----
From: use-livecode [mailto:use-livecode-bounces at lists.runrev.com] On Behalf
Of Lyn Teyla
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2015 4:35 PM
To: How to use LiveCode
Subject: Re: Compare numeric strings with leading zeros

Thierry Douez wrote:

> on mouseUp
>   local userTyping = 5
>   local myVeryStrongPassword = "005"
>   if matchText( userTyping, myVeryStrongPassword) then
>      answer "Great!"
>   else
>      answer "Too bad :( try again.."
>      put "005" into userTyping
>      if matchText( userTyping, myVeryStrongPassword) then answer "Great!"
>   end if
> end mouseUp

I would caution against using matchText for this purpose, because the second
parameter is treated by the function as a regular expression.

For instance, matchText would return true if you were to reverse your
example values:

   local userTyping = "005"
   local myVeryStrongPassword = 5

This is because 005 does indeed contain 5.

In addition, since passwords are typically allowed to contain any character,
including those that have special meaning in regular expressions, something
like this would also return true:

   local userTyping = "5"
   local myVeryStrongPassword = "^5$"

With this in mind, I would go with the method of first checking the length
followed by the values as suggested by a couple of previous posters.

Since Ralph is looking to use this for password validation, I would throw in
a case sensitivity check as well:

on mouseUp
   put stringsAreEqual("005", "5")
end mouseUp

function stringsAreEqual pString1, pString2
   set the caseSensitive to true
   if (len(pString1) = len(pString2)) and (pString1 = pString2) then
      return true
   end if
   return false
end stringsAreEqual


Hope this helps!

Lyn



_______________________________________________
use-livecode mailing list
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode