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From: "James Giles" <jamesgi...@worldnet.att.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
References: <b35fe8c6-8cb4-49a4-955c-29343c54cbe3@b1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: one-liner for characater replacement
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Message-ID: <Vy%Xj.354705$cQ1.150699@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>
Date: Sun, 18 May 2008 19:36:21 GMT
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analys...@hotmail.com wrote:
> I want to replace every occurrence of a dash in a string by a space.
> Surely this can be done with a one-liner?

A very long and hard to read one-liner, sure.  TRANSFER the string
to an array of character (you'll have to do this in two places: the TSOURCE
operand to MERGE, and inside the MASK expression to MERGE), use
MERGE (the FSOURCE operand is, of course, just a space character),
then use TRANSFER again to get the result back into the form of a string.

Unless the above is *very* much faster (or you can prove the code
using it is a *very* critical bottle-neck) you should prefer the more
legible simple scalar loop.

   do i = 1, len(string)
      if(string(i:i) == '-') String(i:i) = ' '
   end do

Of course, you *can* make that a one liner:

   do i = 1, len(string); if(string(i:i) == '-') String(i:i) = ' ';  end do

-- 
J. Giles

"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software
design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously
no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated
that there are no obvious deficiencies."   --  C. A. R. Hoare