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String to List

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg76959] String to List
  • From: "King, Peter R" <peter.king at imperial.ac.uk>
  • Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 05:36:13 -0400 (EDT)

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


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