Scan

Splits a character delimited string into its components (known as tokens). Returns result as string array.

Character used as delimiter may be passed as argument 2. If argument 2 omitted delimiter defaults to a semi-colon.

Arguments

Number Type Compulsory Default Description

1

string

Yes

String to scan

2

string

No

Delimiter

3

real

No

Min number of return values

Argument 1

String to scan.

Argument 2

Delimiter. Semi-colon if omitted. Only a single character is permitted. To scan with multiple delimiters, see the function Parse.

Argument 3

If present, forces the result to be a minimum size. For example, if the input string had two tokens but this argument was set to three, the result would be a string array of length 3 with the third element an empty string. In many applications, this can save testing the length of the return value to determine if an optional token was provided.

Returns

Return type: string array

Returns tokens as an array of strings. Empty fields are treated as a separate token. E.g. in 'BUF04;buf;;Buffers;;' the double semi-colon after 'buf' would return an empty entry in the returned array. So:

Scan('BUF04;buf;;Buffers;;')

would return:

[ 'BUF04', 'buf', ", 'Buffers', "]