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