Question room.people and Curly Braces

It might be something to do with charat:

I wonder if you could subtract %phrase.charat(1)% from %phrase% somehow?

Or possibly contains(). Hrm, this will require more thought and research. Thanks.

How crazy is this? You take the strlen, and charat for strnlen, strlen-1 and strlen-2. Then you put them all together backwards for the two ids and subtract one from the other.

I figure there has to be an easier way but I'm something of a trigger cobbler.

I actually hit on a similar solution for stripping the lead character, except I hadn't figured our how to put the string back together before I hit the hay. I spent much of the morning working on it until I realized I was trying to hard. This what I came up with that would allow me to math on MUD ID's, with proper refining of course. It's probably still a bit over complicated.


Addendum

More generally then:

%room.people% is a metavariable. It holds a "characterinfo" variable for the first char in the room.
When echo'ed, it shows the internal ID of the character, prepended by a character unlikely to be the first in a string ('}'). It is not part of the dg API and can be changed without any notice.

As for creating character pointers by doing "set actor_id }1234", you are running into all kinds of potential problems in the long run.

If you need the the id, just extract it directly with %room.people.id%. Using it for calculations seems rather strange to me, as this is an internal id, which may change to another representation in the future (a hash comes to mind, for instance).

As a side note - using %room.people% for anything other than getting the first character for looping, seems suspicious to me.

thomas wrote: %room.people% is a metavariable. It holds a "characterinfo" variable for the first char in the room.
When echo'ed, it shows the internal ID of the character, prepended by a character unlikely to be the first in a string ('}'). It is not part of the dg API and can be changed without any notice.

But I'm trying to remove the first non numeric character in the string. I don't want it.

As for creating character pointers by doing "set actor_id }1234", you are running into all kinds of potential problems in the long run.

Again, I don't want to use that first non numeric character. I was trying to figure out a general way of removing it so I don't have to depend on using }# if comparing IDs. Secondly, I only used }# in my test script for testing purposes, to see if the } was removed.

If you need the the id, just extract it directly with %room.people.id%. Using it for calculations seems rather strange to me, as this is an internal id, which may change to another representation in the future (a hash comes to mind, for instance).

See above. For reasons you state just above and prior are reasons why I'm trying to strip out the non numeric.

As a side note - using %room.people% for anything other than getting the first character for looping, seems suspicious to me.

Perhaps it is, in your post to Parnassus's thread you seem to indicate that the character's VNUM can be directly derived from the ID. If that's true then I can readily modify the scripts I'm working on to take advantage of that.