Re: 'Flattening'/storing arrays

[Dar Scott]

On Monday, December 16, 2002, at 01:16 PM, Jan Schenkel wrote:

RunRev 2.0 has excellent XML support so that should be
a breeze to implement.

This may run into some special character problems, too.

Of course you can serialise it
now with a simple function such as:

function serialisedArray @pArray
  put "<array>" & return into tSerialisedArray
  put the keys of pArray into tKeys
  repeat for each line tKey in tKeys
    put "<element key=" & tKey & ">" & \
    pArray[tKey] & "</element>" & return \
    after tSerialisedArray
  end repeat
  put "</array>" after tSerialisedArray
  return tSerialisedArray
end serialisedArray

This has some character limitations, too. The key must not contain lineFeed (see keys()) and must be allowable as an XML attribute. The element must be OK as XML text and especially must not contain text that looks like <element..> or </array>

Remember that if you're working with numbers, upon
transforming a number into a string, the engine will
use the 'numberFormat' property, so you may want to
tweak that before using either method, or apply the
'format' function when you serialise the data.

The format idea is a very good one. A format such as "%4.16e" should handle current numbers and %4.32e" might handle lots of future numbers. This will work for Inf, -Inf and Nan on only a few platforms and even less between. If you need to handle these, you may want to handle those specially or use binaryEncode and binaryDecode. If you need a text file, then you can hex those or go back to handling those specially.

Oh, combine and split may have problems with Inf, -Inf and Nan on some systems, too.

It would be nice if we could chose the end-of-line for keys() or--even better--have "repeat for each key". That would make this work easier.

Dar Scott

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