Count number of times a segment occurs

[Mike Keys]

I hope this is easy. I’m trying to count the number of times a specific segment occurs in my HL7 message. It’s variable and I will use this value for a for loop variable later in my uproc.

I can count the number of elements by

set segmentList [split $msg r]            

set elements $segmentList

set j [llength $elements]

Now, I want to see how many of those elements begin with ZTX and return that as a number.

Topic

[Mike Keys]

Well, think I got it figured out. I simply added another foreach loop ahead of the foreach loop that manipulates each segment.

set j 0

foreach ztx $segmentList {

if [cequal [crange $ztx 0 2] ZTX] {

[Charlie Bursell]

Much more ergonomic would be:

set j [llength [lsearch -all -regexp $segmentList {^ZTX}]]

I am not a big fan of unneccesary looping  🙂

[Mike Keys]

Thanks Charlie. I had that earlier minus the {} around ^ZTX.

[Author]

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