Instead of trying to design a 'string-split' that is both miraculously
intuitive and profoundly flexible, why not design it like a Model-T and
then write a guide/cookbook for how to use regexps to do all of the
common cases that the extremely limited 'string-split' doesn't handle?
I suspect that writing such a guide will expose a few cases where common
patterns can be turned into functions (similar to 'regexp-replace-quote').
Ryan
On 04/19/2012 07:27 AM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
Just now, Laurent wrote:
1. Laurent: Does this make more sense?
Yes, this definitely makes more sense to me. It would then treat
(string-split "aXXbXXXXy" "X") just like the " " case.
Although if you want to find the columns of a latex line like "x&&
y& z" you will have the wrong result. Maybe use an optional
argument to remove the empty strings? (not sure)
(This complicates things...)
First, I don't think that there's a need to make it able to do stuff
like that -- either you go with regexps, or you use combinations like
(map string-trim (string-split "x&& y& z" "&"))
4. Related to Q3: what does "xy" as that argument mean exactly?
a. #rx"[xy]"
b. #rx"[xy]+"
c. #rx"xy"
d. #rx"(?:xy)+"
Good question. d. would be the simplest case for newbies, but
b. might be more useful. I think several other languages avoid this
issue by using only one character as the separator.
The complication is that with " " or " \t" it seems that you'd want b,
and with "&" you'd want c. (Maybe even make"&" equivalent to
#rx" *& *" -- that looks like it's too much guessing.)
And you're also making a point for:
e. Throw an error, must be a single-character string.
BTW, this question is important because it affects other functions, so
I'd like to resolve it before doing anything.
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