trimleft on a numeric field

Mary,

string trimleft is for removing characters.

If you want a certain single character then either

string index where index of 0 is character one

or

string range where first and last are indexes to the character(s) you want (like for the first character would be 0 0).

Mary,

Are you sure your lindex of xlateInVals is returning what you want?

Actually it wasn’t clear what you want trimmed off the left side of the number. I assumed that it was zeros, but if you change the pattern to {^[^1-9]*([1-9])} it would trim anything except 1-9.

try:

set new_field [csubstr $orig_field 0 1]

or

set new_field [string range $orig_field 0 0]

either of these will grab the first character of your input field.

I am wondering though: can your inbound value also be ‘Hello123’? You would get ‘H’ in return with the last solution. Or do you need the ‘1’ to be returned in this case?

I think it’s a terminology problem. In TCL, “trim” means to throw away or ignore characters at the beginning or end of a string. I think she just wants to return the first character of a string.

The c-commands are legacy tcl commands. The better approach moving forward would be like this …

set xlateOutVals

0 1]]

Also, it is important to always treat xlateInVals and xlateOutVals as tcl list objects (and not string objects). Even when you are 100% sure that you inbound value will not contain a space, someone someday may clone your code and use it for values containing spaces.