Concatenating plurals

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(imported topic written by brolly3391)

It seems that the concatenation operator (&) does not let you concatenate lists. While playing with the Drive letter/removable media question I stumbled across this limitation. I have hit this snag in the past and had given up. I do see the difficulty. How do you correlate the 2 lists to insure that the first list entries matched the second list entries. In the example, if drive A has no floppy in it then the entry in the File System Type list will be missing and the lists are different lengths and they will match up incorrectly.

q: names of drives

A: A:

A: C:

A: D:

q: file system types of drives

A: NTFS

A: CDFS

q: names of drives & file system types of drives

E: A singular expression is required.

Something more like this? or maybe creative use of a whose it?

q: (names & file system types) of drives

E: The operator “names” is not defined.

q: drives whose (name of it & file system type of it)

E: A boolean expression is required.

q: (name of it & file system type of it) of drives

E: Singular expression refers to nonexistent object.

I am stumped on this one. Maybe one of the higher thinkers can come up with an elegant solution?

Brolly

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(imported comment written by dgibson91)

Try this:

q: (names of it, file system types of it) of drives

A: C:, NTFS

A: D:, NTFS

A: F:, CDFS

I: plural ( string, string )

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(imported comment written by brolly3391)

dgibson,

I did not know about the comma operator. That was the answer that I was looking for and delivered with speed. Thanks.

When I apply the comma operator as you suggested, the results I get back are not exactly what I expected when operating on plural strings.

q: names of drives

A: A:

A: C:

A: D:

q: (names of it , file system types of it) of drives

A: C:, NTFS

A: D:, CDFS

I would have expected to see:

A: A:,

A: C:, NTFS

A: D:, CDFS

If one of the operands of the comma is non-existant, it seems to drop the entire result.

The comma operator seems to be missing from the Operators table in the String section of WinInspectors-2006-04-28.pdf. I checked for more with

q: binary operators “,”

which returns no answer. I do not know where to look for some documentation on the comma operator.

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(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey Brolly,

The “,” operator allows you to create “tuples” and is only available in BES 6.0 components. For instance:

q: 1,“hi”,now

A: 1, hi, ( Wed, 16 Aug 2006 10:39:07 -0700 )

T: 11.533 ms

I: singular ( integer, string, time )

To answer your original question, you can take advantage of the “it” operator to iterate through a list and withdraw specific attributes. For instance:

q: (name of it & " – " & file system type of it) of drives

A: C: – NTFS

A: D: – CDFS

A: K: – NTFS

A: O: – NTFS

T: 7.091 ms

I: plural string

You basically listed this relevance query in your post, but it is giving an error because there is no file-system type of the “A:”. Try this slight modification:

q: (name of it & " – " & (if (exists file system type of it) then (file system type of it) else “n/a”) of drives

Note that whenever you are iterating through drives, you must be careful because sometimes you will trigger the floppy drive light to access.

Ben