I'm not sure why "whenever we want to work with the characters within a
line, we'd have to unbox it" is considered such a drawback, especially
given the "each" conjunction. I frequently work with character data and
find it very useful to build my code to work on a string, then apply that
code with "each" to an entire file broken into useful pieces, e.g.
grab2After=: ] (] {~ 1 2 + [)~ ] i. [: < [
'values' grab2After 'some';'test';'values';'hit0';'hit1';'nohit'
+----+----+
|hit0|hit1|
+----+----+
rr=. (<'values') grab2After &.>"1 <;._1&>TAB,&.><;._2 ] LF
(],[#~[~:[:{:]) CR-.~fread 'somefile.txt'
(where the "<;._1&>TAB..." stuff before the "fread" boxes lines on LFs,
then boxes items on each line based on tab-delimiters.)
But, as Raul says, it's hard to speculate usefully about undefined problems.
On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 1:30 AM, Raul Miller <rauldmil...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 4:29 PM, Joe Bogner <joebog...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think ragged lines in this context means delimited text (not fixed
> width).
> >
> > It sounds like the author recognizes the options:
> >
> > "For J the choice is not quite as clear. One way of loading the data
> > would be to `box' each line and then create a vector of boxes to
> > represent all of the data in the file. This works fine, but whenever
> > we want to work with the characters within a line, we'd have to unbox
> > it before doing so. An alternative would be to load the file as a
> > character array, but this would necessitate `squaring up' the data,
> > padding each of the lines out to match the length of the longest
> > single line, thus producing a rectangular matrix. While either of
> > these choices could be made to work, they generally seem, to me at
> > least, to be somewhat cumbersome in comparison with K's much more
> > straightforward treatment."
> >
> > What's unclear to me is what the author means by this: "but whenever
> > we want to work with the characters within a line, we'd have to unbox
> > it before doing so." - specifically what "work with the characters"
> > means.
>
> Another option involves a one dimensional array of characters, and
> then working with indices and corresponding sequence lengths in that
> array...
>
> But it's hard to say anything useful about an unknown problem.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Raul
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>
--
Devon McCormick, CFA
Quantitative Consultant
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