Re: String to List
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg76980] Re: String to List
- From: Jean-Marc Gulliet <jeanmarc.gulliet at gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 03:21:27 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
- References: <f3jigv$dpo$1@smc.vnet.net>
King, Peter R wrote: > I have a string which in general looks something like > > a="{x,16,x,1T,x}" > > In other words it looks like a list with a mixture of characters and > numbers and so on. I want to pick out the individual elements of this > (using the commas as delimiters) > > Clearly a[[1]] etc doesn't mean anything > > I can do b=ToExpression[a] and I get a list so b[[1]] is x and > b[[2]]=16 (that is the number sixteen but I can convert this back into = > a > string with ToString. The problem is b[[4]] which ToExpression turns > into T as it thinks I mean 1 x T. > > So I would appreciate help with either > > i) converting my original string to a list as I would like > > Or > > Ii) stopping the evaluation of 1T into T so that I can get the string 1T > > (The only thought I had was to step through the original string > character by character telling it to put the characters into different > elements of a list each time I pass a comma, but this looked a bit > cumbersome). > > Many thanks, > > Peter King Hi Peter, The built-in function StringSplit will do what you want. For instance, In[1]:= a = "{x,16,x,1T,x}" b = StringSplit[a, "," | "{" | "}"] b[[1]] b[[4]] Out[1]= "{x,16,x,1T,x}" Out[2]= {"x", "16", "x", "1T", "x"} Out[3]= "x" Out[4]= "1T" Regards, Jean-Marc