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Start of Chapter 20: Advanced Text |
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Back to §20.2. Memory limitations |
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Onward to §20.4. Upper and lower case letters |
Inform 7 Home Page / Documentation
§20.3. Characters, words, punctuated words, unpunctuated words, lines, paragraphs
Inform can get at the contents of text in a variety of ways. The lowest-level is by character - a character is a letter, digit, punctuation symbol, space or other letter-form. (We use the term "character" rather than "letter" because otherwise we would have to call "5" a letter, and so on.) Characters number upwards from 1: character number 1, to repeat that, starts the text. We can get the Nth character with:
character number (number) in (text) ... text
This phrase produces the Nth character from the text, counting from 1. Characters include letters, digits, punctuation symbols, spaces or other letter-forms. Example:
character number 8 in "numberless projects of social reform"
produces "e". If the index is less than 1 or more than the length of the text, the result is an empty text, "".
The maximum character number varies with the current length of the text, and can be evaluated as:
number of characters in (text) ... number
This phrase produces the number of characters from the text. Characters include letters, digits, punctuation symbols, spaces or other letter-forms. Examples:
number of characters in "War and Peace"
number of characters in ""
produce 13 and 0 respectively.
We can also use the adjective "empty":
The empty text, "", is the only one with 0 characters.
We can also extract the contents by word, again numbered from 1. Thus:
word number (number) in (text) ... text
This phrase produces the Nth word from the text, counting from 1. Words for this purpose are what's left after breaking the text up at punctuation or spacing (spaces, line breaks, paragraph breaks) and then removing that punctuation or spacing. Exa ple:
produces "don't". If the index is less than 1 or more than the number of words in the text, the result is an empty text, "".
number of words in (text) ... number
This phrase produces the number of words from the text. Words for this purpose are what's left after breaking the text up at punctuation or spacing (spaces, line breaks, paragraph breaks) and then removing that punctuation or spacing. Exam le:
produces 5.
Note that the contraction apostrophe in "don't" doesn't count as punctuation. Because this is not always quite what we want, Inform offers two variations:
punctuated word number (number) in (text) ... text
This phrase produces the Nth word from the text, counting from 1. Words for this purpose are what's left after breaking the text up at punctuation or spacing (spaces, line breaks, paragraph breaks) and then removing the spacing, but leaving the punctuation as ndependent words. Example:
produces "-". The punctuated words here are "ice", "-", "hot", ",", "don't", "you", "think", "?". If two or more punctuation marks are adjacent, they are counted as different words, except for runs of dashes or periods: thus ",," has two punctuated words, but "--" and "..." have only one each. If the index is less than 1 or more than the number of punctuated words in the text, the result is an empty text, "".
number of punctuated words in (text) ... number
This phrase produces the number of words from the text. Words for this purpose are what's left after breaking the text up at punctuation or spacing (spaces, line breaks, paragraph breaks) and then removing the spacing, but leaving the punctuation as i dependent words. Example:
produces 8; see if you can find them all.
unpunctuated word number (number) in (text) ... text
This phrase produces the Nth word from the text, counting from 1. Words for this purpose are what's left after breaking the text up at spacing (spaces, line breaks, paragraph breaks) but including all punctuation as if it were part of the spelling of the words it joins to. Example:
produces "ice-hot,". The unpunctuated words in "ice-hot, don't you think?" are "ice-hot,", "don't", "you", "think?". If the index is less than 1 or more than the number of punctuated words in the text, the result is an empty text, "".
number of unpunctuated words in (text) ... number
This phrase produces the number of words from the text. Words for this purpose are what's left after breaking the text up at spacing (spaces, line breaks, paragraph breaks) but including all punctuation as if it were part of the spelling of the words it oins to. Example:
produces just 4.
Finally, on the larger scale still, we also have:
line number (number) in (text) ... text
This phrase produces the Nth line from the text, counting from 1. Unless explicit use is made of line-breaking, lines and paragraphs will be the same - it doesn't refer to lines as visible on screen, because we have no way of knowing what size scre n the player might have.
number of lines in (text) ... number
This phrase produces the number of lines in the text. Unless explicit use is made of line-breaking, lines and paragraphs will be the same - it doesn't refer to lines as visible on screen, because we have no way of knowing what size screen he player might have. Example: the number of lines in
"Sensational news just in![paragraph break]The Martians have invaded Miranda.[line break](One of the moons of Uranus, that is.)"
is 3.
paragraph number (number) in (text) ... text
This phrase produces the Nth paragraph from the text, counting from 1.
number of paragraphs in (text) ... number
This phrase produces the number of paragraphs in the text. Example: the number of paragraphs in
"Sensational news just in![paragraph break]The Martians have invaded Miranda.[line break](One of the moons of Uranus, that is.)"
is 2.
(Attempting to make large enough texts to have a serious paragraph count is slightly risky if there is not much memory to play with, as on the Z-machine. But the facilities do exist.)