NCL Home> Documentation> Functions> String manipulation

str_sub_str

Replaces a substring with a new substring.

Available in version 5.1.1 and later.

Prototype

	function str_sub_str (
		string_val : string, 
		oldString [1] : string, 
		newString [1] : string 
	)
	return_val [dimsizes(string_val)] : string

Arguments

string_val

A string array of any dimensionality.

oldString

The substring to be replaced.

newString

The substring to replace with.

Description

This function returns an array of strings with every occurrence of oldString replaced by newString.

If either oldString or newString are missing, then the original strings will be returned.

Examples

Example 1

Replace "orange" with "strawberry", and put back into the same variable:

 aob = "apple_orange_banana" 
 o = "orange"
 s = "strawberry"
 aob = str_sub_str(aob,o,s)
 print(aob)

Output:

(0) apple_strawberry_banana

Example 2

Assume you have an ASCII file "asc4.txt":

The 15 most populous nations
Data taken from Wikipedia, October 2008
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Country Population (millions) Percentage (of world)
China 1,321 19.84%
India 1,132 16.96%
United States 304 4.56%
Indonesia 232 3.47%
Brazil 187 2.80%
Pakistan 163 2.44%
Bangladesh 159 2.38%
Nigeria 148 2.22%
Russia 142 2.13%
Japan 128 1.92%
Mexico 107 1.60%
Philippines 89 1.33%
Vietnam 84 1.31%
Germany 82 1.23%
Egypt 81 1.13%
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Total 4,356 65.32%

The following script will replace "United States" with "U.S. " and "," with "":

 flnm = "asc4.txt"
 strs = asciiread(flnm,-1,"string")
 strs = str_sub_str(strs, "United States", "U.S. ")
 strs = str_sub_str(strs, ",", "")
 print(strs)