How do you loop through a string, and split the string up based on the

Data Transformation (DTL), HL7, ObjectScript, Ensemble

Way back when during our Siemens LCR days we had to limit the number of characters in OBX.5 to a length of 75. That was back when we had eGate.

Now I need to do the reversal of that and take loop through a string length and split the string up into multiple OBX or NTE based on a certain length. In reading documentation $EXTRACT can do this if you know the exact length, but in this case we don't.

So how would one loop through a string and say every 75 characters create a new OBX or NTE segment?

Thanks

Scott

Answers

Answer by Jeffrey Drumm 9 days ago

OK, it's quick and dirty and I'm probably doing something that will make the old-timers here laugh hysterically, but it works. The caveats are:

It only cares about word wrapping on the space character. Punctuation adjacent to non-space characters will stay with the adjacent characters.
It totally ignores things like \.br\ tags. they're just text as far as it's concerned.
It returns a $LIST, where each list element is a line of text from the source string, no longer than the width specified. You can iterate through it with $LISTNEXT or $LISTGET and populate your OBX segments, but you'll probably have to do that in a CODE rule.

So anyway ...

ClassMethod WordWrap(pTxt As %String, pWidth As %Integer) As %List
{
    If $LENGTH(pTxt) > pWidth
    {
        set tLine = ""
        Set tCnt = 0
        Set tWordList = $LFS(pTxt," ")
        Set tListLen  = $LISTLENGTH(tWordList)
        Set tWordPtr = 0
        Set tWordCur = ""
        While $LISTNEXT(tWordList,tWordPtr,tWordCur)
        {
            If $LENGTH(tLine_tWordCur) > pWidth
            {
                Set $LIST(tList,*+1) = $ZSTRIP(tLine,">W")
                Set tLine = tWordCur_" "
                Set tLastCnt = tCnt
            }
            Else
            {
                Set tLine = tLine_tWordCur_" "
            }
            Set tCnt = tCnt + 1
        }
    }
    Else
    {
 	Set tList = $LB(pTxt)
	Set (tLastCnt,tListLen) = 0
    }
    If tLastCnt < tListLen
    {
         Set $LIST(tList,*+1) = $LTS($LIST(tWordList,tLastCnt + 1,tListLen)," ")
    }
    Return tList
}

Have fun!

Accepted answer

Answer by Robert Cemper 10 days ago

as a quick approach:

  set instring="........whatever you  need .........."
  set len=75
  for part=0:1 {
    set segment=$extract(instring,part*len+1,part+1*len)
    do OBX(segment)
  if $length(instring)<(part+1*len+1)  quit      ; nothing left
  }

;;; have no details how OBX looks like but this are the pieces

Answer by Sourabh Sethi 10 days ago

/// pStr - Complete string that require to split
/// pByLen - Length you want in each part
/// arrObx - passed by reference to store each OBx in array

ClassMethod SplitByLen(pStr As %String, pByLen As %Integer, ByRef arrObx) As %Status
{
   Set (startPos,obxCntr)=0
   for
   {
      Quit:'(startPos < $L(pStr))
      Set arrObx($I(obxCntr)) = $E(pStr,$I(startPos),startPos+pByLen-1)
      Set startPos = startPos + pByLen
   }
   Quit $$$OK
}

+ 1

Comment by H.Frank Kern 10 days ago

??? what's different ???

Answer by Mohammed Ansar ... 9 days ago

utilize a for loop

Comments

Comment by Jeffrey Drumm 10 days ago

Scott, is there any requirement that this field be split along word boundaries such as whitespace and punctuation characters? That makes it a bit more challenging :)

Comment by Charles (Chuck)... 9 days ago

The Mighty Jeffrey Drumm!

Yes there is a requirement to split on words. Otherwise we would be simply using a similar loop as above on substring and dumping the output into OBX5's.

Chuck Kozak

How do you loop through a string, and split the string up based on the number of characters

Answers

Comments