From: Vebjorn Ljosa
Subject: Re: parsing a comma delimited string
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 23:32:54 +0000
Message-ID: <cy3r8qlm7kp.fsf@ljosa.com>

* Myriam Abramson <········@osf1.gmu.edu>
| 
| Could somebody please show me how to loop through a comma-delimited
| string the right way.

With the help of SPLIT-SEQUENCE
(<URL:http://ww.telent.net/cliki/SPLIT-SEQUENCE>):

(split-sequence #\, "foo,bar ,baz, foobar , barbaz,")
=> ("foo" "bar " "baz" " foobar " " barbaz" "")

-- 
Vebjorn Ljosa

From: Thomas F. Burdick
Subject: Re: parsing a comma delimited string
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 08:42:02 +0000
Message-ID: <xcvzo57s2w5.fsf@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU>

Vebjorn Ljosa <·····@ljosa.com> writes:

> * Myriam Abramson <········@osf1.gmu.edu>
> | 
> | Could somebody please show me how to loop through a comma-delimited
> | string the right way.
> 
> With the help of SPLIT-SEQUENCE
> (<URL:http://ww.telent.net/cliki/SPLIT-SEQUENCE>):
> 
> (split-sequence #\, "foo,bar ,baz, foobar , barbaz,")
> => ("foo" "bar " "baz" " foobar " " barbaz" "")

For what it's worth, I think this is a completely wrong way of doing
this.  It conses unnecessarily, and can generally get in the way of
neat tricks.  I use a utility to iterate through the string, and call
my code with the start and end of the substrings.

I posted my utilities to do this here:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=group:comp.lang.lisp+splitting-vector&hl=en&rnum=1&selm=xcvvghhpw95.fsf%40conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU

(Note the messed up error message for call-splitting-vector, when
start < 0, oops)

-- 
           /|_     .-----------------------.                        
         ,'  .\  / | No to Imperialist war |                        
     ,--'    _,'   | Wage class war!       |                        
    /       /      `-----------------------'                        
   (   -.  |                               
   |     ) |                               
  (`-.  '--.)                              
   `. )----'