ULSFindAttr

Searches a string for the first character that fits the specified attribute criterion.

NOTE

The 'start' and 'max' parameters both specify a number of characters, not a number of bytes. (In the case of MBCS codepages, these may not be the same thing).

Arguments

ULSFindAttr( string, attribute [, start] [, max] [, flag] [, codepage] [, locale])

Parameters

string

The input string to be searched.

attribute

The name of the attribute to search for. Valid attribute names are listed under the ULSQueryAttr function description. The name is not case sensitive.

start

The character position within the string to start searching from. Must fall between 1 and the string length (in characters). Defaults to 1 (the start of the string) if not specified.

max

The maximum number of characters to search. Defaults to the length of the string (in characters) if not specified.

flag

The type of search to perform. Only the first character is significant, and (if specified) must be one of the following values:

T = True: find the first character that matches the specified attribute. This is the default.

F = False: find the first character that does not match the specified attribute.

codepage

The source codepage (a positive integer). This is the codepage with which <string> is encoded (i.e. under which it would display correctly). The default is the current process codepage.

locale

The name of the locale whose text-attribute rules are to be used. Locale names are usually of the form "xx_YY", where "xx" is a language and YY is a country (e.g. "en_US", "zh_TW", "it_IT", etc.) The default is to use the current locale as defined by the LANG and LC_* environment variables.

Return Value

The character position of the first match, or 0 if no matching characters were found. If an error occurs, an empty string ("") is returned and the global ULSERR variable will be set to a non-zero value.

Example

Example:

/* Input string (encoded for codepage 850) */
string = 'We had lunch at a caf‚ in Reykjav¡k.'
SAY string

/* Search string for the first non-ASCII character */
c = ULSFindAttr( string, 'ascii',,,'F')
IF ULSERR \= '0' THEN
     SAY ULSERR
  ELSE
     SAY 'The first non-ASCII character is at position:' c

Output:

We had lunch at a caf‚ in Reykjav¡k.

The first non-ASCII character is at position: 22