String Functions

This returns the value of an integer as a string.

Params

Returns

The string representation of num.

Return the numeric value of a string.

Params

Returns

A positive or negative integer if it begins with a number, or 0 if it is not numeric.

Return the length (in bytes) of a string.

Params

Returns

An integer length.

Extract one or more words from a string.  A word, in this case, is a sequence of non-whitespace characters.  If the ‘last’ word (as in the parameter ‘last’) is 0, it means extract everything from the first through the end of the string.  The numbers are inclusive, so:

words$("this is a test", 1, 2) = "this is"
words$("this is a test", 2, 0) = "is a test"
words$("this is a test", 3, 3) = "a"
words$("this is a test", 2, 10) = "is a test"

Note that the first and last values are automatically clipped to the largest values possible Also, the whitespace is preserved between the first and last words (but whitespace on the front or back is stripped).

words$("this is a test",

Params

Returns

A string containing the words between first and last inclusive.

Return the number of words in a string.

Params

Returns

An integer indicating the number of words in the string.

Find the first occurance of a substring in a string starting at a given position.  Searching begins at position start + 1, and a return value of 0 indicates no match found, otherwise the position of the first character of the search string is returned.

You might think that the start + 1 searching mechanism is odd, but it allows easy construction of enumeration loops (and is more consistent with other search routines such as database searching).  For an example see the following.

i = pos(str$, "foo", 0);
while( i )do
{
   do_stuff(i);
   i = pos(str$, "foo", i);
}

Some examples of use might illustrate the behavior better.

pos("blahb", "a", 0) = 3
pos("blahb", "b", 0) = 1
pos("blahb", "b", 1) = 5
pos("blahb", "b", 5) = 0
pos("blahb", "la", 0) = 2
pos("blahb", "al", 0) = 0

Params

Returns

The position of the first character of needle$ in haystack$ or 0 if no match is found.

Extract the N left-most characters of a string.

Params

Returns

A the left-most part of str$ not longer than N characters.

Extract a substring.  This will extract a portion of the string beginning anywhere in it.

Params

Returns

A the slice of str$ not longer than N characters and starting at the ‘start’th character.

Extract the N right-most characters of a string.

Params

Returns

A the right-most part of str$ not longer than N characters.

Make an uppercase copy of a string.

Params

Returns

A copy of str$ with every character uppercased.

Make a lowercase copy of a string.

Params

Returns

A lowercase version of the string.

Determine if a string is composed entirely of alphabetic characters.

Params

Returns

Returns true if every character is an alphabetic character.

Determine if a string is solely numeric characters.  The string can optionally have a negative sign on the front and still be considered numeric.  Basically, this returns true if val() would make sense on this string.

Params

Returns

Returns true if every character is numeric.

Return a string corresponding to the ASCII character given.

Params

Returns

A string of that character.

Return the ASCII value of the first character in the string.

Params

Returns

The ASCII value of the first character in the string.

Generate a hexadecimal representation of an MD5 hash of the string.  An MD5 hash is a hashing algorithm for generating a signature of a string.  This routine returns a hexadecimal representation of the 16 byte hash value.

Params

Returns

A 32 character hexadecimal string representing the hash value.

Generate a string representation of a blowfish hash of the string.  Blowfish is a cryptographically strong hashing algorithm for generating a signature of a string.

You can pass a salt to use, or an empty string to generate a random one (recommended).

Params

Returns

A string representing the hash value.

Generate an ANSI color code sequence for the specified foreground and background combination.  The ansi colors are listed below.  Note that only the lower 8 colors may be used for background colors (this is a limitation of the ANSI standard).  Bold colors are generally interpreted as brighter on most client programs, but they can also make the font used actually bold as well.  A color value of -1 will generate a color code sequence that sets only the other color.  For example ansicolor$(1, -1) will leave the background color alone and set the foreground to red.

] Color Name FG?  BG?  ] -1 (Default color) y y ] 0 Black y y ] 1 Red y y ] 2 Green y y ] 3 Yellow y y ] 4 Blue y y ] 5 Magenta y y ] 6 Cyan y y ] 7 White y y ] 8 Grey (Bold Black) y - ] 9 Bold red y - ] 10 Bold green y - ] 11 Bold yellow y - ] 12 Bold blue y - ] 13 Bold magenta y - ] 14 Bold cyan y - ] 15 Bold white y -

Params

Returns

An ANSI color code sequence (string) that can be sent to a player to instruct his/her client to change the color of any incoming text.

Replace all instances of one string with another.

Params

Returns

A new string with every instance of pat$ in str$ replaced with repl$.

Match a text against a provided regular expression.  The compiled expression is cached, making the matching very fast.  Note that character groups (\d, \w, ...) need to have the backslash doubled.

Params

Returns

Index of the matching substring, or 0 if no match found.

Similar to match, but returns the matched string and capture groups.

Params

Returns

A vector with the matched string in index 0, and matched capture groups in subsequent ones.