How best to check if string contains any of a list of substrings?

[Keith Clarke]

Thanks Alex - I thought the single-pass ‘is among’ with wildcards was a long-shot, so I’ll concentrate on debugging the list iteration using the ‘contains’ check. :-)

The strings & sub-strings are simple - I have a large list of URLs that need to be processed differently (or ignored), based on various sub-string ’signatures’ that route them into different ‘buckets’ in an array.

The ’signatures’ vary - hence my use of a list variable (derived from a field) rather than hard-coding the plain text as literals.

BTW Good spot on the asterisk wildcard characters in the contains example below. This is just a typo in the email - they’re not (among the numerous bugs!) in the real code. :-)

Thanks again for the steer.
Best,
Keith

> On 1 Nov 2018, at 10:34, Alex Tweedly via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Keith,
> 
> I think the simplest method would be (almost) your second attempt below. However, you were using "*est*" - i.e. with the '*'s before and after the phrase, which is what you would need for 'filter' but not for 'contains'. So it should work with just
> 
>> put “my test phrase” into myTestPhrase
>> put “est” & cr & “phr” into tSubstrings
>> 
>> repeat for each line L in tSubstrings
>> 	if myTestPhrase contains L then answer “true”
>> end repeat
> There's almost certainly also a way of doing it in a single pass using regex - but I'm not brave enough to go there :-)
> 
> Are you expecting reallylarge strings to search ?  Or really many phrases to search for ?
> 
> "beware optimizing something that is just plain fast enough already"
> 
> Alex.
> 
> On 01/11/2018 09:41, Keith Clarke via use-livecode wrote:
>> Folks,
>> What is the most efficient way to test whether a variable containing a string such as “my test phrase” contains one of several variable substrings, such as “est” OR “phr” OR... ?
>> 
>> So far I’ve tried (without luck) approaches that simplify into...
>> 
>> put “my test phrase” into myTestPhrase
>> put “*est*” & cr & “*phr*” into tSubstrings
>> 
>> if myTestPhrase is among the lines of tSubstrings then answer “true”
>> 
>> repeat for each line L in tSubstrings
>> 	if myTestPhrase contains L then answer “true”
>> end repeat
>> 
>> Both seem to be failing - do I have the wrong syntax or approach to the problem?
>> 
>> TIA
>> Keith
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