[Maya Melscript] Searching through a string of Text for a symbol?

StephenVyas

Hi guys,

I'd like to find a way to  search through a piece of text for a specific symbol
This symbol     :


Think I got the hard part done, but could really use an extra brain to help with the rest
 
proc string checkforsymbol(string $inputName) {
if this    :      symbol exists within the $inputName string.
return removeNameSpace($inputName);
}else {
return $inputName;
}

proc string removeNameSpace(string $inputName){

string $outgoingName[];

$numTokens = `tokenize $inputName ":" $outgoingName`;

return $outgoingName[1];

}

Any ideas?

Bartalon

Try using the match command.

{
    string $test = "group1:pCube1";
    if ( `match ":" $test` == ":" ) {
        print "Found special character. \n";
    }
}

Alternatively you should just be able to tokenize without having to check for it first.  If tokenize doesn't catch anything to split, the destination array will have a size of 1, the original string.

StephenVyas

Perfect! Thanks Bartalon

kodde

This is something python does easily for you. Could be a reason to switch to python instead?

StephenVyas

 Yeah, I'd like to learn a Python.
Because Maya chooses to echo all of it's commands in Melscript.. it's simply easier for me to learn & figure out the syntax of the mel  language

I have no doubt Python can do things more efficiently

tkvtoons

Took a crack at this in Python. I did it quickly, so only took into account if the inputString contains just 1 namespace.

inputString = 'tester:test'

def checkForSymbol(inputName):
    if ':' in inputName:
        outgoingName = inputName.split(':')[1]
        return outgoingName
    else:
        return inputName

checkForSymbol(inputString)

StephenVyas

Holy crap Python is clean. Beauty job TkvToons 

I really like how you don't have to declare whether variables are strings, ints, floats, etc
or brackets even??  jeeez.. that would have saved me loads of time from trying to track down those misplaced squirrely sobs

tkvtoons

I'm sure someone else could write it even cleaner than that. I'm just starting to get more comfortable with Python. I've been scripting in MEL for 6+ years or so and just started to force myself to convert to Python a few months ago.

I do like how clean it can be, variables don't have to be defined, no ending lines with semi-colons. It just feels much more efficient. Only thing you really have to watch out for is indents - messed up indents can make everything stop working.