Question about DeleteCases to remove list elements based on first character
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg124291] Question about DeleteCases to remove list elements based on first character
- From: Andrew DeYoung <adeyoung at andrew.cmu.edu>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:06:38 -0500 (EST)
- Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com
Hi, I have a list of strings in which some elements begin with the ";" character and some do not. The ";" character indicates a program comment, so I wish to drop all elements in the list that begin with the ";" character. As a simplified example, suppose I have the following list S: S = {"abc", ";def", "ghi", ";jkl", "; mno", "pqr;X"} I wish to drop from S all elements that begin with ";". So, I want to obtain: {"abc", "ghi", "pqr;X"} Will you please help me know how to do this? Can this be done with DeleteCases? For example, I tried: DeleteCases[S, StringTake[#, 1] == ";"&] and DeleteCases[S, ";" ~~ __] but I am wrong: these do not work. Can you please help me? Thanks so much. Andrew DeYoung Carnegie Mellon University