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From: naz@hslrswi.hasler.ascom.ch (Norman H. Azadian)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.icon
Subject: a small problem
Keywords: string scanning
Message-ID: <1716@hslrswi.hasler.ascom.ch>
Date: 9 Jan 91 12:20:56 GMT
Organization: Hasler AG
Lines: 36


I'm new to this string scanning stuff, and I'm having difficulty finding
a nice clean way to perform the following simple calculation.

I have a string, S, in which I want to know the number of characters
which are used by any of several known substrings.  There is no problem
with overlapping substrings.

Here is a small example to show exactly what I mean:

	count := 0
	every  s ? find ("whizzy" | "ding")  do  count +:= 1

This would do what I want if I merely wanted to count the number of
occurrences of the substrings "whizzy" and "ding".  However, what I
want to do is know the total number of characters in s which are
used for these substrings, however many times they may occur.

I'm hoping to find something with an elegance approaching that of
the above example.  Brute force solutions need not apply.


P.S.  The real-life problem is that I have ANSI control sequences
embedded in a string which wants to be centered.

NHA
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