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finditems

# $EPIC: finditems.txt,v 1.2 2007/02/27 04:57:37 jnelson Exp $

Synopsis:

$finditems(<array> <string>)

Description:

If you remember with setitem, you provided an array name, an item number, and some stuff. This function returns a word list of ALL of the item numbers whose “stuff” is <string>.

To be more precise about it, this function returns a word list X that contains numbers N such that

for i in ($finditems(//array// //string//)) { 
	if (getitem(//array// $i) === '//string//' {
		echo True;
	} else {
		echo False;
	};
};

only outputs True and never False. This function is slower than finditem which only finds one item, instead of all of them. The function ifindfirst finds the first index number.

Practical:

These functions are useful when you want to see if a particular string is present in an array. Being sensitive to case, they are more precise than the general pattern-matching functions.

Returns:

  -2   item not found in array
  -1   array does not exist
> -1   item/index number that matches input

Examples:

/* contrived sample array */
$setitem(booya 0 blah)
$setitem(booya 1 foobar)
$setitem(booya 2 blah)

$finditem(booya blah)                   returns 0
$ifinditem(booya blah)                  returns 1
$ifindfirst(booya blah)                 returns 0
$finditem(booya Blah)                   returns -1
$finditem(foobar blah)                  returns -2
finditems.txt · Last modified: 2007/02/27 04:57 by 127.0.0.1