OpenEdge Development:<br />Progress 4GL Reference NUM-ENTRIES function

Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress 4GL Reference

NUM-ENTRIES function

Returns the number of elements in a list of character strings.

Syntax
NUM-ENTRIES ( list [ , character ] ) 
list
A character expression containing a list of character strings separated with a character delimiter. The list can be a variable of type CHARACTER or LONGCHAR. NUM-ENTRIES returns the number of elements in the list. Specifically, NUM-ENTRIES returns the number of delimiters plus 1, and it returns 0 if list equals the empty string ("").
character
A delimiter you define for the list. The default is a comma (,). This allows functions to operate on non-comma-separated lists. If you use an alphabetic character, this delimiter is case sensitive.
Examples

This procedure uses NUM-ENTRIES and ENTRY to loop through a list of regions and display them, one per line. Since there are obviously five regions, the REPEAT statement, REPEAT i=1 TO 5, works fine here.
r-n-ent1.p
DEFINE VARIABLE i AS INTEGER.
DEFINE VARIABLE regions AS CHARACTER INITIAL "Northeast,
  Southest,Midwest,Northwest,Southwest".
REPEAT i=1 TO NUM-ENTRIES(regions):
  DISPLAY ENTRY(i,regions) FORMAT "x(12)".
END. 
In the following example, PROPATH is a comma-separated list of unknown length:
r-n-ent2.p
DEFINE VARIABLE i AS INTEGER.
REPEAT i=1 TO NUM-ENTRIES(PROPATH):
  DISPLAY ENTRY(i,PROPATH) FORMAT "x(64)".
END. 
This procedure uses NUM-ENTRIES to loop through the PROPATH (a comma-separated list of directory paths) and print the directories, one per line.

This example uses a list that does not use commas as a delimiter. This procedure returns a value of 13:
r-n-ent3.p
DEFINE VARIABLE sentence AS CHARACTER.
  sentence  = "This sentence would be seven words long "
      + "if it were six words shorter".
DISPLAY NUM-ENTRIES(sentence," "). 
Note

The NUM-ENTRIES function is multi-byte enabled. The specified list can contain entries that have multi-byte characters and the character delimiter can be a multi-byte character.

See also

ENTRY function