Re: Concatenate elements of string array

[kluegel(at)lanl.gov]

In article <7oo5ds$c9c@post.gsfc.nasa.gov>,
  fireman@mcst.gsfc.nasa.gov (Gwyn Fireman) wrote:

> IDL> string_array=['one ','string ','split ','into ','many ','array
elements']
> IDL> help,string_array & print,string_array
> STRING_ARRAY    STRING    = Array[6]
> one  string  split  into  many  array elements
> IDL> byte_array=byte(string_array)
> IDL> byte_array=reform(byte_array,n_elements(byte_array))
> IDL> byte_array=byte_array[where(byte_array ne 0)]
> IDL> one_string=string(byte_array)
> IDL> help,one_string & print,one_string
> ONE_STRING      STRING    = 'one string split into many array
elements'
> one string split into many array elements

Clever.  Reminiscent of APL.

Playing with your approach, I see the BYTE(string_array) produces a 2D
array where one dimension is the number of characters in the longest
string of the original 1D array.  So a nasty case would be an array of
strings where one string was very long and all the others were short.
This would make the intermediate 2D array very big.

Another limitation is that we must make a rule that no strings may
contain any nul characters.

Something tells me this is all the better that can be done with
array-based approaches.  But just in case... Any other ideas out there?

-- Tom Kluegel


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