Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!TARDIS.CRAY.COM!cargo
From: cargo@TARDIS.CRAY.COM (David S. Cargo)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.icon
Subject: concat with blank and a question
Message-ID: <9001191439.AA00765@zk.cray.com>
Date: 19 Jan 90 14:39:35 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet
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I recently purchased a product called HyperPAD for the PC.  It is intended
to be a HyperCard-like product for the PC.  What I found interesting was
something in its list of operators.  To concatenate two strings there is
the concatenation operator &.  However, there is an operator to concatenate
two strings with a space in between them, the && operator.  I realized that
this one little feature was a a nice convenience.  I know I have often used
something like  a || " " || b because I needed to put a space between two
strings I was combining.  Maybe from an overall language viewpoint this isn't
a significant improvement, but I thought it was an interesting addition to
a language with string processing.

The question I have is:  What is the best way to elminate spaces (or, to
generalize, members of a particular cset) from a string while still preserving
the order of the remaining characters?  I'm going to be performing some comparisons
where certain characters are very likely to not be significant.  I'm looking for
an efficient way of doing preprocessing to remove the insignificant characters.

                         o       o
                          \_____/
                          /-o-o-\     _______
DDDD      SSSS   CCCC    /   ^   \   /\\\\\\\\
D   D    S      C        \ \___/ /  /\   ___  \
D   D     SSS   C         \_   _/  /\   /\\\\  \
D   D        S  C           \  \__/\   /\ @_/  /
DDDDavid SSSS.   CCCCargo    \____\____\______/ CARGO@TARDIS.CRAY.COM