Re: Concat an entire array

Hello,

I would go with Michael’s approach as the most efficient - except
there is no need to define “string” as a field, simply name the DS
itself as “string".

Efficient, yes, but not very versatile. Doing it that way, you must always include all elements in the array, and you are limited in how they are concatenated (it must always be as one big string).

For example, suppose you wanted a comma between each element in the array...

for x = 1 to highestUsedArrayElement;
if x=1;
string = array(x);
else;
string += ',' + array(x);
endif;
endfor;

Same with any other separator. Maybe the array contains words that should be separated by spaces, for example... easy to do with a loop.

in JavaScript, there's something called join that makes this very easy, I like the way that works.

string = array.join(',');

RPG doesn't have that, of course, so you use the loop. I haven't found any instances where it makes sense to use a DS overlay, because it's unusual for me to have an array where I always use all elements of it. Most of the time there's unused elements at the end. Also, this special handing of inserting something between the elements is something I need often, and there's no way to do that with the DS approach.

Jeff said one thing that puzzles me. He said it's always filled with semicolons... That's weird. Why would you use an array for something like that? Just do this:

string = *all';';

now the string is filled with all semicolons. isn't that a lot easier?

-SK