Differentiating between a number and a letter

[montymay]

Can LC tell whether a character is a number or a letter? I have a locked field with list behavior set to true that lists the chapters of a title in a legal code, e.g., "Chapter 6 - Retirement Fund." However, the Legislature named a few chapters like this, "Chapter 23A - Government Claims." The latter naming convention (number plus letter) "spoils" the following script:

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      put the selectedtext into tSelection
      put the second word of tSelection into tChapterNumber      
     if tChapterNumber < 10, then
        [statements]
        else
       [statements]
       end if

LC will not recognize "23A" as a number greater than "9", so the the statements after "else" will not execute. If all number+letter "words" in the chapter names were the same length, I know how to extract the number, but they could be 2, 3, or 4 characters in length, e.g., "9A", "25A", or "100A."

If the number absolutely must be extracted from a variable-length chunk, I am guessing that there is a custom function that could do it, but I can't find any discussion in this forum, the User Guide, etc. Is a custom function the answer? Thank you for any suggestions.

Monty May

[dunbarx]

Hi.

Simple function. But before that, why are you validating the chapter at all? In other words, if it can be either a number or a string, what is the advantage? Now if there is something special about the first nine chapters (whether they are "6" or "6A' or not, since you check for values <9) then OK. But if not, then why do it?

Or if you know much more about this than I do:

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function goodNumber tText
   repeat for each char theChar in tText
      if theChar is in ".0123456789" then put theChar after temp
   end repeat
   return temp
end goodNumber

Craig Newman

[snm]

So "21.32.787.22" is the number

Marek

[dunbarx]

Marek.

So "21.32.787.22" is the number

The function would return that string. Is that a bad thing? Do you mean to say that the string is not a valid number? The function does not check that, only removing all but periods and digits. The chapters given as an example might actually have that format (Chapter 23.3.1).

But if not, modifying the function to allow only one period, or similarly, checking to see if the final filtered string is a number, is simple enough.

SNM, is any of this important to you?

Craig

[montymay]

Hello Dunbarx,

Thank you for your quick reply. To answer your question, the purpose of my app is to download a selected chapter from a website that I don't control into a revBrowser on the same card as the field. Since I can't change the url, my script has to capture it exactly. The URLs on the website are written in the following pattern:

. . .
http://www.guamcourts.org/CompilerofLaw ... 7gc009.pdf
http://www.guamcourts.org/CompilerofLaw ... gc009A.pdf
. . .
http://www.guamcourts.org/CompilerofLaw ... gc042A.pdf
. . . and so forth

The "composite numbers" are the exception to the rule, so my script is written:

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                              if tChapterNumber > 9 then
               revBrowserSet gBrowserID, "url", tURL&"0"&tTitleNumber&"gca/"&tTitleNumber&"gc0"&tChapterNumber&".pdf"
            else
               revBrowserSet gBrowserID, "url", tURL&"0"&tTitleNumber&"gca/"&tTitleNumber&"gc00"&tChapterNumber&".pdf"
            end if

As you can see, the "gc00" changes to "gc0" if the chapter number is greater than 9 and therefore my script must resolve a composite number such as "9A" or "42A." As I am not a trained programmer (self-taught), I see no other way than to somehow get the number inside tChapterNumber. Is there another way to achieve my purpose?

Thanks again.

Monty

[dunbarx]

Hmm.

Tell me again, exactly what you need. If you run the "goodNumber" function above, which extract only the numeric part of any string, why can't you incorporate this into your "revBrowserSet" command?

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if goodNumber(tChapterNumber) > 9 then

Craig