APARSE Function

Parses a string into words and returns the number of words found and places the words in an array.

Category:	String
Returned data type:	Integer

Syntax

Required Arguments

Comparisons

Example

Syntax

APARSE(string, delimiter, word_list)

Required Arguments

string

specifies the string that needs to be separated into words; this can be specified as fixed string, field name, or expression

Restriction	string should not be NULL, it causes a run-time error.
Note	If string is empty (""), a value of 1 is returned and word_list has one element that contains an empty string.

delimiter

specifies a string that contains the character to be used as delimiter when separating the string into words; this can be specified as fixed string, field name, or expression

Restriction

If multiple characters are specified, only the last character is used.

word_list

specifies a string array that contains the words that were found during parsing; this is specified as a field name

Comparisons

The parse function is similar. It returns individual string fields instead of a string array, the string fields must be specified as part of the function invocation. The APARSE function does not have this restriction and can therefore be used when the maximum number of words is not known in advance.

Example

string = "one:two:three"
delimiter = ":"
nwords = aparse(string, delimiter, word_list) // outputs 3
first_word = word_list.get(1) // outputs "one"
last_word = word_list.get(nwords) // outputs "three"