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Calling Sequence

Result = STRING( Expression ₁ , ..., Expression _n )

Arguments

Keywords

Differences Between STRING and PRINT

The behavior of STRING differs from the behavior of the PRINT procedure in the following ways (unless the PRINT keyword is set):

• When called with a single non-byte argument and no format specification, STRING returns a result that has the same dimensions as the original argument. For example, the statement:

HELP, STRING(INDGEN(5))

gives the result:

<Expression> STRING = Array[5]

while:

HELP, STRING(INDGEN(5), /PRINT)

results in:

<Expression> STRING =' 0 1 2 3 4'

• If called with a single argument of byte type and the FORMAT keyword is not used, STRING simply stores the unmodified values of each byte element in the result. This result is a string containing the byte values from the original argument. Thus, the result has one less dimension than the original argument. For example, a 2-dimensional byte array becomes a vector of strings, a byte vector becomes a scalar string. However, a byte scalar also becomes a string scalar. For example, the statement:

PRINT, STRING([72B, 101B, 108B, 108B, 111B])

produces the output:

Hello

because the argument to STRING, is a byte vector. Its first element is a 72B which is the ASCII code for "H", the second is 101B which is an ASCII "e", and so forth.

• If both the FORMAT and PRINT keywords are not present and STRING is called with more than one argument, and the last argument is a scalar string starting with the characters "$(" or "(", this final argument is taken to be the format specification, just as if it had been specified via the FORMAT keyword. This feature is maintained for compatibility with version 1 of VMS IDL.

Example

To convert the contents of variable A to string type and store the result in the variable B, enter:

B = STRING(A)

See Also

BYTE , COMPLEX , DCOMPLEX , DOUBLE , FIX , FLOAT , LONG , PRINT/PRINTF