psych@watserv1.waterloo.edu (R.Crispin - Psychology) (12/07/90)
I seem to have run across a string comparison problem with HC 2.0. do the following put "123Y4567Y890Y..." into strA put "123Y456Y..." into strA put numtochar(217) into strB -- this can be generated using option shift ` -- it shows up as various characters depending on the font put offset(strB,strA) into s s will have the value 3. It seems theat HC maps strings into standard ASCII characters (7 bits instead of 8) before it does the comparison. I had no end of problems with this. The only solution I have found to this is to convert the 2 strings to there number formats and then to compare them. This only works for single characters. I end up doing something like this: put "123Y456Y890Y..." into strA put numtochar(217) into strB put offset(strB,strA) into s if chartonum(strB) = chartonum(char s of strA) then This works but is not very nice. I checked the meager docs that I have and could not find any reference to this sort of thing happening. If anyone has a better work around for this I would like to hear from you. Part of the problem is that the Mac incourages the use of all these special characters with the option key. I don't know why HC doesn't support them fully. They can be entered into fields and text strings but you then can't compare them. This is silly. Please email to one of the addresses below. Thanks Richard Crispin Phone: (519)888-4781 Dept. of Psychology Bitnet: psych@watdcs University of Waterloo Internet: psych@watserv1.UWaterloo.ca Waterloo, Ont. Canada N2L 3G1