Locate first non occurrence of a character in a string

[devans_1]

Hi Board,

Does anyone know how to find the first occurrence in a string that is not the one specified - e.g. I have a string

'ZZZZZZ1234'

and I would like to find the position of the first occurrence that is not 'Z' (i.e. '7'). There are lots of functions that allow locating a specific string but I can't find one that does the opposite. Note the above is just an example so I can't just look for '1' as this could be any character that isn't 'Z'.

[rbartley · Accepted solution]

Hi,

How about using Replace(Word,'Z','') to get the string without the Zs, then take the length of the new field away from that of the original field, e.g.:

Word_TMP:

Load * Inline
[Word
'ZZZZZZ1234'];

Word:
Load *,
Len(Word)-Len(NoZs) as "FirstOccurenceNoZs";
Load
Word,
Replace(Word,'Z','') as "NoZs"
Resident Word_TMP;


Drop Table Word_TMP;

You could use the same approach directly in the chart, but it won't be as efficient since it will have to perform the operation in memory:

=Len(Word)-Len(Replace(Word,'Z',''))

[devans_1 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for this. I solved the problem, similar to yourself by using PurgeChar then looking for the occurrence of the first character left - e.g.

index (Patterna, left (PurgeChar (Patterna, '~'), 1))
where Patterna is a line like
'~~~~~~~1234'
so after a purge of '~' the first character is '1' and searching for this in the original string will give the position of this.