Re: sscanf "inconsistency" ?

[Peter Jensen]

Henry,

Sorry I did not elaborate sufficiently. The problem is that the
result from sscanf is "ThisisOK" which is not  the same as
a = ["this" ; "is" ; "OK"] i.e a column vector. As the vector
returned from sscanf  is a row vector, it is immediately concatenated
to the string "ThisisOK". It is therefore impossible to
extract the three  "tokens" namely "this"; "is" and "OK".

I don't think octave has any other way of extracting "tokens"
from a string. "split" is a poor substitute as it require an exact match
of the "separator", whereas sscanf  interprets one or more
occurrences of "white space" as a separator.

I think it is a bug that sscanf returns a row vector (when %s is used)
and not a column vector as suggested by the documentation. This
also makes the function less usable.

Any comments ?.

Peter

Henry F. Mollet wrote:

> I'm getting something slightly different. Not sure if it helps.
> Henry
>
> octave:37> text    = "This is OK" ;
> octave:38> numbers = "1 2 3 4 5" ;
> octave:39> [return_string,length] = sscanf(text,"%s") ;
> octave:40> length
> length = 3
> octave:41> return_string
> return_string = ThisisOK
>
> octave:43> [return_number,length] = sscanf(numbers,"%d") ;
> octave:44> length
> length = 5
> octave:45> return_number
> return_number =
>
>  1
>  2
>  3
>  4
>  5
>
>
> on 10/20/04 2:09 PM, Peter Jensen at address@hidden wrote:
>
>  
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am new to octave. Writing some small test programs
> > I found the following "inconsistency" in the sscanf
> > function. When numbers are extracted a column
> > array  is returned, however if strings are extracted
> > a row array is returned.  Please note that the number of
> > fields identified ( written to length) is correct in both cases.
> >
> > Have I misunderstood something, or is sscanf
> > behaving is an inconsistent manner ?.
> >
> > Peter
> > -----------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > text    = "This is OK" ;
> > numbers = "1 2 3 4 5" ;
> >
> > text
> > [return_string,length] = sscanf(text,"%s") ;
> > length
> > return_string
> > a = ["this" ; "is" ; "OK"]
> >
> > numbers
> > [return_number,length] = sscanf(numbers,"%d") ;
> > length
> > return_number
> >
> > a  = [ 6 ; 7 ; 8 ; 9 ]
> >
> >
> >
> >
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>
>
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