I have misunderstood the behavior of the function (all these years). I thought it simple parsed the string as a delimited string, but instead it returns the nth word of the string using the delimiter as a break point. Something like if I was to ask for the 1st word of the string " This is a test " with space being the delimiter. After trimming the leading delimiters, the first word would then be 'This'.

I have been using GetWordNum since it was in FoxTools.fll. But now I need to rethink how it is to be used.

I see a SHIT load of unit testing ahead of me.

Thank you all for the insight.



>How this address the question of your original post?
>
>Quote: If the string being searched begins with the delimiter, and you are requesting the first word, the function will return the Second word in the list.
>
>>Yes, this may be better then ALINES solution
>>
>>
>>>The behavior you describe is the designed behavior -- not what I wanted either. In the case of a delimited string such as
>>>
>>>

>>>lcString = "test1|test2||test4"
>>>

>>>
>>>I would want the third word to be empty; however, GETWORDNUM() returns test4 as the third word and GETWORDNUM() returns 3, instead of 4. If you do a string translation first and insert a space in a null place:
>>>
>>>

>>>lcString = "test1|test2||test4"
>>>DO WHILE ATC("||", lcString) > 0
>>>   lcString = STRTRAN(lcString, "||", , "| |")
>>>ENDDO
>>>lcThird = GETWORDNUM(lcString, 3, "|")
>>>

>>>
>>>Now you will get the results that you expect.