Re: String Manipulation - Help Needed

["Corey Ashford" <corSPAMey@rational.com>]

Howard Davies wrote in message ...
>Hi,
>I have a sentence stored in a string and I need to remove all spaces and
>punctuation from the string.
>My 600 page Ada book just says that this requies advanced packages that
>are beyond the scope of the book.
>Can someone help me out?
>
>Many thanks,
>--
>Howard Davies           Howard@roslyn.demon.co.uk

The first idea that comes to mind is something like:

function excise_puctuations(s : string) return string is
    count : natural := 0;
begin
    for i in s'range loop
        if not is_punctuation(s(i)) then
            count := count + 1;
        end if;
    end loop;
    declare
        result : string(1..count);
        idx : natural := 1;
    begin
        for i in s'range loop
            if not is_punctuation(s(i)) then
                result(idx) := s(i);
                idx := idx + 1;
            end if;
        end loop;
        return result;
    end;
end excise_punctuation;

the function is_punctuation would look something like:

function is_punctuation(c : character) return boolean is
begin
    return not (c in 'a'..'z') and not (c in 'A'..'Z');
end is_punctuation;

- Corey

(to send me e-mail, remove the word SPAM from my e-mail address)