Split text function given at interfaceware website breaks when text is large

Splitting a report into multiple fields;
I am not very well versed with lua . I found this piece of code here on your website:
http://help.interfaceware.com/kb/1079

It does work for couple of lines but when the text chunk is very large, it breaks with error:

Call stack has exceed maximum of depth of 100

giving this error in findWord() function and message remains stuck in Iguana queue. Any help on this?

Thanks

The function could be re-written not to use recursion or you could search the net and find another implementation. There are quite a few out there. What are you doing with it?

string.split is a short list of functions we are planning to roll into the core of Iguana itself – it’s something which gets used a lot in practice. Our re-write will most likely be in C – we have a few routines which would do the trick without much drama.

string.split is a short list of functions we are planning to roll into the core of Iguana itself

Did my suggestions from this weekend make the cut? 😉

Jeff Drumm ◊ VP and COO ◊ HICG, LLC. ◊ http://www.hicgrp.com

LOL 🙂 Thanks Eliot and Jeff. But Can I have something to get out of this problem at the moment? or may be if it’s possible to increase number of allowed recursive calls/stack size in Iguana?

I think we need a little more information, Sim. What are you trying to split, and what are the rules to follow for splitting it? Is there a delimiter to split on, or are you just trying to break a large body of unformatted text into individual lines?

Jeff Drumm ◊ VP and COO ◊ HICG, LLC. ◊ http://www.hicgrp.com

I am trying to achieve exactly the same thing as in the split text example i.e Break large chunks of text into individual lines of 80 characters each .
In the example given above, It breaks the text into lines of 80 characters(80 is the limit) and stores each of them in table called ‘rs’.
So, ultimately what we get is

Input: Large chunk of text

rs[1] = ‘line 1 of 80 characters’
rs[2] = ‘line 2 of 80 characters’

and so on till the end of text chunk which was passed as input to split text function. and the words should not break in middle while marking the end of a line at 80 characters.

🙂
Please let me know if It was not clear

This is a rewrite of the example without recursion. Be aware that it is not thoroughly tested.

require('stringutil')
require('node')

local MAXLEN = 80 -- we wish to have maximum of 80 characters per line

function main(Data)   
   local In,Name = hl7.parse{vmd='Untitled.vmd',data=Data}
   local Out = hl7.message{vmd='Untitled.vmd',name=Name}
   
   Out:mapTree(In)
   -- in this example we have only 1st repetition of Observation, with very long OBX-5
   Out.Observation[1].OBX:remove(1) 
   
   local RS = splitText(In.Observation[1].OBX[1][5]:S(),MAXLEN)
   
   for i=1,#RS do   
      Out.Observation[1].OBX[i][1] = i
      Out.Observation[1].OBX[i][2] = 'TX'
      Out.Observation[1].OBX[i][3][1] = In.Observation[1].OBX[1][3][1]
      Out.Observation[1].OBX[i][5][1] = RS[i]
   end
   
   queue.push(Out:S())
end

function splitText(s,maxLen)
   local rs ={}
   local start = 1
   local i = 1

   while true do
      local pos = start + maxLen
      local ct
      ct = s:find('[ \t]', maxLen)
      if ct == pos or ct == pos-1 then
         rs[i] = s:sub(start, start + maxLen - 1)
         start = start + maxLen
         i = i + 1
      else
         local cnt = s:sub(start, start + maxLen -1):reverse():find('[ \t]')
         if cnt == nil then cnt = 0 end -- if last rep doesn't find a space
         if #s:sub(start) < = maxLen then -- catch last rep           
            rs[i] = s:sub(start)
            break -- exit loop on last rep
         else
            rs[i] = s:sub(start, start + maxLen - cnt)
            start = start + maxLen - cnt + 1
         end
         i = i + 1
      end
   end
   return rs
end

Sim who are you doing this work for?

@Julian muir: It was really an interesting implementation and worked just perfect:)
Thanks a ton

@jeff yes probably going to put some pcre compatible string functions in.