I've used the cascading Format trick too. I have also found that when the string manipulation involves input of information external to DX to pass to FileSelector, Import, etc. writing a little shell or perl script as a DX import filter is easier and more flexible.
Chris Pelkie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>@opendx.watson.ibm.com on 01/24/2002 08:06:38 AM Please respond to [email protected] Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [email protected] cc: Subject: Re: [opendx-users] String manipulation in DX >>> >> >>Use the Parse module. For your example using the format string >>"%[^.].txt" would suffice. Unfortunately the parse module doesnt >>seem to handle the more obvious "%s.txt". >> >>Richard. >> >>-- >>Richard Guenther <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>PGP: 2E829319 - 2F 83 FC 93 E9 E4 19 E2 93 7A 32 42 45 37 23 57 >>WWW: http://www.anatom.uni-tuebingen.de/~richi/ > > >- Oh, that's purty! I flipped back through the tattered pages of my O'Reilly "sed & awk" and maybe finally understand the ^ as exclusion metacharacter! Thanks. It appears you can be more "parse"imonious here though and simply use "% [^.]" But I needed this the other day (to tear off all but the suffix from a filepath/name input from FileSelector, so thanks! BTW, David et al., I may have posted in the past, but here's a trick to stuff a format template manufactured on the fly into Format. Haven't tried it on Parse, but it should work: The template string is: "%%%d.%df" then feed two integers in. This gives you a variable float format expression, like "%3.1f" Feed this into the template of another Format and also the float you want to format. -- Chris Pelkie Vice President/Scientific Visualization Producer Conceptual Reality Presentations, Inc. 30 West Meadow Drive Ithaca, NY 14850 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
