Re: Newbie question

[Michal Nowak <vinnie@inetia.pl>]

On 01-12-31 at 17:51 Jasbinder S Uppal wrote:

[snip]

>PS Michal hope ur feeling better, if not, a dose of Ada will certainly fix
>any ailments u have.....

Thank you sincerely, I'm OK now. I'm glad I've been a bit helpful. I hope
that the errors I made did not confused you. I'm newbie also...My advices
were a bit in C-tone, I wasn't well aware of Ada strings. I learned a bit
more when I was lying in bed and reading Cohen's book. Maybe this will be
more helpful than my last "advices".
If you have access to Reference Manual (HTML files are installed with GNAT,
so you should), look at Annex A, section 4 (particularly 4.2).
There is useful package Ada.Strings.Maps and Ada.Strings.Fixed (the latter
in case if you use fixed length Strings). It will be much easir to parse
the input line using functions and procedures from these packages. I think
that procedure Find_Token will be helpful. A token can be a sequence of
characters belonging to some set. The second parameter of Find_Token is of
type Character_Set. As I remember, the first word was the name of place
(so it consists of upper and lowercase letters) and the second was road
number (consisting of letters and numbers) and the rest was hour (only
numbers). In Ada.Strings.Maps.Constants there are predefined sets of
chracters:
Alphanumeric_Set : ISO-8859-1 letters and numbers,
Letter_Set : ISO-8859-1 letters,
Decimal_Digit_Set : Decimal numbers.

Alphanumeric_Set consists not only Enlish letters, but also letters with
diacritical marks. This piece of code shows chracters from this set:

with Ada.Strings.Maps.Constants;
    use Ada.Strings.Maps;  --for procedures
    use Ada.Strings.Maps.Constants; --for constant sets
with Ada.Text_IO;
    use Ada.Text_IO;

procedure Show_Set is
begin
    Put (To_Sequence(Alphanumeric_Set) );
end Show_Set;

If you apply Find_Token to extracting values, all can be written
like this:
Find_Token (Input_Line, Letter_Set, Inside, From, To);

In From and To variables you will get beginning and end of first
word. You may than use slice operation to get the first word into
string:
Place := To_Unbounded_String (Input_Line (From .. To) );
(I assume here, that place is of type Unbounded_String, declared in
Ada.Strings.Unbounded, you may need to "with" this package);

Than you may repeat the search for the second word:
Find_Token (Input_Line (To + 1 .. Input_Line'Last), Letter_Set, Inside, From, To);
                        ^^
     This To was obtained in first call to Find_Token.

And then extract the second word and do the same for numbers.

I hope I was more helpful now and that I was not to late.
Enjoy,
Mike(
-----------------------------------------
                             ____|
                             \%/ |~~\
  O                                  |
 o>>        Mike Nowak               |
 T                                   |
/ >       vinnie@inetia.pl           |
http://www.geocities.com/vinnie14pl _|__