Expressions and String Comparisons?

[Kid_Roleplay]

Probably a silly question: I know you can compare numerical values for greater than, less than, equal to, different than, etc.; and when it comes to using numbers, it's straight forward. Now, this is probably a silly question, but when it comes to strings, how do the greater than and less than comparisons function?

What would be greater than or less than the string... erm... "Orange" for example?

[schrodinger]

I think the same "rules" as Windows does with sorting, i.e. for filenames etc.:

The sorting functions compare two strings by checking the first characters against each other, the second characters against each other, and so on until they find an inequality or reach the ends of the strings. These functions return the difference of the values of the first unequal characters they encounter. For example, lstrcmp determines that "abcz" is greater than "abcdefg" and returns the difference of the code-point numbers that correspond to "z" and "d." The selected user locale determines which string is greater (or whether the strings are the same)

So:
123456
will come before
124
(even if 124 is a much smaller number)

but:
123455
will come before
123456


so "oramge" is lower than "orange"
but "oraoge", or "orbnge", or even "orc" are bigger

[Kid_Roleplay]

I see. That being said, would "orange juice" be greater than "orange"?

Actually, say if you have multiple events looking at multiple objects with different Alterable Strings.

"Orange"
"Orange Juice"
"Orange Soda"
"Tomato"

How would you make an event find all Alterable Strings greater than or equal to "Orange" while it only finds those that at least contain the word "Orange" in them, so that it doesn't grab "Tomato"?

[Vetmora]

Not sure if this thread is helpful at all? http://community.clickteam.com/threads/90110-search-for-string-in-string

[schrodinger]

Yes "Orange Juice" is bigger than "Orange"
(the first character different in the two strings is " ", which is bigger than "" )

Assuming you are iterating through all your objects,
you would do something like:

on each one of "my_object"
>>> set global value "pick_instance" to fixed value("my_object")
>>> start loop "check_strings" (number of alt. strings you have times)

on loop "check_strings"
+fixed value of "my_object" = pick_instance
+Find(AltStrN$( "my_object",( loopindex("check_strings")), "Orange", 0) >= 0
+AltStrN$( "my_object",( loopindex("check_strings")) >= "Orange"
>>> this strings meets the requirements! (do stuff with it...)

[Kid_Roleplay]

Is there a way to do it as a much simpler condition by chance?

Alterable Value A >= "Orange"
Alterable Value A contains "Orange"

I've a feeling having a loop inside of another loop for every instance of every object that will have these Alterable Strings will cause quite a bit of slowdown. And unfortunately, a lot of that looks like Greek to me.

Also, Snail's example no longer exists in that link.

[schrodinger]

No way - if you want to check every single alt. string of each object,
...you have to check every single alt. string of each object

You could do that "manually" without the nested loop,

i.e.

altstring1 contains "orange"
+altstring 1 >= orange

altstring2 contains "orange"
+altstring 2 >= orange

altstring3 contains "orange"
+altstring 3 >= orange

but this won't change much (if anything at all) in processing speed

above example is quite short anyway (just two events)
if it's not clear I can provide an example of it?

[Kid_Roleplay]

Examples are always nice. :p

And I actually would only need something that says "altstring1 contains 'orange'" in it, if of course there's an event for that.

[schrodinger]

here's a super quick example:

find_orange.mfa

let me know if any doubt

[Kid_Roleplay]

I think that was probably much easier shown than explained. Haha. Apparently there's a ton of expressions and events I have no idea even exist, but that's exactly what I was looking for. Literally just one conditioned line (in addition to A.S. >= "orange").

Thanks again!