String Parser: advanced use

[Boba Fonts]

I'm playing with the String Parser 2 by 3EE and I've no problem doing basic things such as setting delimiters, retrieving tokens, positions in list, etc.
Now I wonder if it's possible to use delimiters contextually, to have a certain character or string -say, the blank space- acting as a delimiter but not -say- when between brackets.
This could be particulary useful to get a phrase as a single token such as follows:

CharacterName say (I can't go that way)

( ) = always delimiters
blank space = delimiter if NOT between ()

so that I can get:
token 1 = CharacterName
token 2 = say
token 3 = I can't go that way

Is it possible? Thanks

[Simon]

Did you have a specific reason to want the spaces to have two different meanings as tokens/not? Depending on what are trying to do, I can think of a few solutions...

[Boba Fonts]

The only reason is to have a more readable script.

[Simon]

Well there are few ways to achieve this that I can see, but they all involve extra parsing of the strings by hand and I personally wouldn't recommend it. My suggestion would be to use the String Tokenizer object. This can support 2D tokens so you could have this:

CharacterName/say/I can't go that way#CharacterName2/say/We can't go that way

This would allow you to return a 2D array, using "#" as the X delimiter and "/" as the Y delimiter. The array would contain the following data:

{X:0} [CharacterName] [say] [I can't go that way]
{X:1} [CharacterName2] [say] [We can't go that way]

The array is all internal to the string tokenizer object, you just access the data by asking for an X and Y position using the provided expression. It's obviously not human readable as you asked, it's just how I'd do it to be efficient.


I suppose the easiest way to achieve exactly what you're after is:

take string: "CharacterName say (I can't go that way)"

tokenize it using "(", giving you -> "CharacterName say" & "I can't go that way)"

store the second token in a string variable somewhere using: left$(thestring, len(thestring)-1) which will strip off the ")" left at the end of it

then, tokenize the first token ("CharacterName say") using a space character, which will give you "CharacterName" and "say"


You could maybe use regular expressions (regexp) to directly return specific portions of the string too. There is a Regular Expressions object and maybe another I can't remember right now. http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html here's a tutorial on how to use regular expressions.

Good luck!

[Boba Fonts]

I think the best method for me right now is the two-steps tokenization with "(".
Thank you for your time, Simon!