[m-rev.] diff: string splitting routines to string.m

[Ondrej Bojar]

Ralph Becket wrote:
> In this case I'm just looking for a convincing case *for*
> split_at_string, but I'm not arguing *against* it.

It's a generalization of split_at_char. To be honest, I came across it 
in one project only so far, but it simplifies nicely situations where 
you want some hierarchy of delimiters:

sentence_id ||| I|pronoun am|verb sleepy|adj ||| scores

Usually, one would use 'tab' to delimit main columns and 'space' to 
delimit words/subfields within fields. Some people are afraid of 
whitespace delimiters and prefer to use a printable character. One needs 
to escape the character (the whitespace too, but it's not that common 
that your data actually contains whitespace). So for each level of 
delimiting, you need another character and another escape sequence. If 
your fields are never blank, you can however use just different number 
of copies of the single delimiter char, to mark different levels of 
segments. And this is where split_at_string is useful.

Probably not very convincing, though....

O.

-- 
Ondrej Bojar (mailto:obo at cuni.cz)
http://www.cuni.cz/~obo
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