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Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

After upgrading to the newest version from 1.something I noticed that the %gsl function for at least letters "l" and "m" returns a string with much whitespace between words. For example if %gsl(l) was expected to return "An old key" you might get "An <much whitespace here> old <much whitespace here> key" which I find a bit annoying. I just had to write my own innerTrim function to "normalize" the sentence. I hope this will be fixed at some point although I realize that while annoying it's not blowing up CMUD as certain other bugs (like writing """ in a string list variable for instance).

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

This isn't really a bug in CMud so much as CMud not taking the initiative. The extra whitespace shown is coming straight from Simutronics servers as part of the GS tag. I think they're doing a fixed-length formatting function on their end.

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

I believe you are wrong there because it worked nicely before the update to 2.18. I was as mentioned before coming from the latest 1.something.

Zugg could have removed trimming deliberately but why would he?

Magician Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Posts: 317 Location: Denmark

A little correction to myself:

I didn't use the %gsl function before as the trigger was able to give me a nicely formatted string in %2 instead. After updating this didn't work anymore so I had to look to the %gsl function to get the information. Why I can't use %2 (or many other parameters that I tried too) I do not know but I cannot find any reason for it except that it's a bug.

Wizard Joined: 22 Mar 2007 Posts: 2320

I think you'llhave to explain a little further about how you were using %2, and how it wasn't working. Can you give us the code you were using and what happened?

Newbie Joined: 12 Dec 2007 Posts: 5

I don't know if this will help much but this is the code i'm using to remove those spaces which actually arn't considered spaces by CMUD but rather as words.

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

No, they are not words. By default, %numwords() uses the space as a boundary. A string with 14 spaces would be considered to have 14 words, but all the words happen to be a null length.

You should be able to pick up on this by carefully examining the output using the %word() function (%word works the same way as %numwords, except it allows you to specify a specific one instead of counting them up). Instead of returning a space, the 14th "word" should be literally nothing at all.

Newbie Joined: 12 Dec 2007 Posts: 5

Yeah that's exactly what i was getting out of it so I was quite confused. I guess I just assumed that %numwords() only counted words eather way though the code I posted takes out those spaces but if someone knows a better way I'd love to know how.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

A simple regex substitution takes care of it

Newbie Joined: 12 Dec 2007 Posts: 5

see now that's just too easy, thank you very much that works like a charm

Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 9:37 pm

I don't remember doing anything to change whether spaces in GSL are trimmed or not. But you definitely uncovered a bug in the %word command. It isn't supposed to treat multiple spaces as multiple works like that. I think it's related to how the new string list hash table works (%word uses the string list hash table code replacing " " with "|"). Anyway, I've added this to the bug list so that CMUD will treat multiple spaces as a single space like it did in previous versions.