Operations with String lists and Waves

gravityhomer wrote:

1) Is there an easy way to take the points of a wave and turn them into a string that is a list. And likewise take a string list and turn it into a text wave (or a normal wave using str2num). I usually need to use a do while loop and cycle through the number of points in the wave. Seems like there would be an easier way, to go from a string list to a wave and or the reverse.

aclight wrote:

However for the reverse you can use a wave assignment statement. For example:

string text_string = "a;b;c;d;e;f;g;"
Make/T/N=(ItemsInList(text_string, ";")) text_wave
text_wave = StringFromList(p, text_string, ";")

print text_wave text_wave[0]= {"a","b","c","d","e","f","g"}

gravityhomer wrote:

The reason why I wish I could easily convert a wave to a string list is that it is really easy to search string lists. Let's say I have a text wave, it is more difficult to search what point, matches a known string.

aclight wrote:

gravityhomer wrote:

The reason why I wish I could easily convert a wave to a string list is that it is really easy to search string lists. Let's say I have a text wave, it is more difficult to search what point, matches a known string.

Have you looked at the FindValue operation? With the /TXOP flag, you can search a text wave for a specific text value. Also, if you're using Igor 6 or above, you can use the Grep operation to do hard core searching of text waves. That's a bit more complicated than using FindValue, but also more powerful, for example if you need to find the same string multiple times. Finally, you could use the Extract operation, but it's less likely that you'd need to use Extract since the first two options work in most situations.