SUBSTR Function

Chapter Contents

Language Reference

SUBSTR Function

takes substrings of matrix elements

SUBSTR( matrix, position<, length>)

The inputs to the SUBSTR function are as follows:

matrix: is a character matrix or quoted literal.
position: is a numeric matrix or scalar giving the starting position.
length: is a numeric matrix or scalar giving the length of the substring.

The SUBSTR function takes a character matrix as an argument along with starting positions and lengths and produces a character matrix with the same dimensions as the argument. Elements of the result matrix are substrings of the corresponding argument elements. Each substring is constructed using the starting position supplied. If a length is supplied, this length is the length of the substring. If no length is supplied, the remainder of the argument string is the substring.

The position and length arguments can be scalars or numeric matrices. If position or length is a matrix, its dimensions must be the same as the dimensions of the argument matrix or submatrix. If either one is a matrix, its values are applied to the substringing of the corresponding elements of the matrix. If length is supplied, the element length of the result is MAX(length); otherwise, the element length of the result is

NLENG( matrix) - MIN( position) + 1 .

The statements

   B={abc def ghi, jkl mno pqr};
   a=substr(b,3,2);

return the matrix

           A        2 rows      3 cols    (character, size 2)

                              C  F  I
                              L  O  R

The element size of the result is 2; the elements are padded with blanks.

Chapter Contents
Previous
Next
Top