AutoHotkey Community

[Laszlo]

Lists are important building blocks for maintaining varying length of sequences, like applications, websites, window ID's, etc. AHK offers practically just one simple function for handling them

[Laszlo]

Here is the second part (less tested).

[Laszlo]

Here is the third part, removing identical items from lists. The script below is faster than sorting. For each item in the list a local variable is generated, named by the hex representation of the name of the item (which could contain illegal characters for a variable name, like "."). If this name is new, it is the first occurrence of the item, otherwise we cut this item off the list.

[Chris]

Very nice. Perhaps these list management functions are abstract enough to be a good general-purpose library. If so, they can eventually be consolidated and put into a new "standard includes" folder that can be distributed with AutoHotkey.

To include something from the standard folder, the syntax might enclose the filename in <> such as:
#Include <ListMgmt.ahk>

But no final decision on syntax has been made. Maybe someone will think of something better.

[Jon]

Nice script, Thanks for putting them together Lazlo. I'm sure I'll be finding them useful in the future.

[Laszlo]

Thanks for the nice words. I applied some minor changes (removed unnecessary %'s, partial results; added tests). I'll keep the current version here, as it might become too long for posting.

[Invalid User]

I was also thinking of putting together a pile of lifunctions for lists and other functions I use often in scripts. My pile-o-functions should include:

Move a list item up one
Move a list item down
Select next item
Select pevious item
Drag and Drop onto list
Remove item from list
Filtering script for mass drag and drop to exclude certain defined files
Move group of selected items up
Move group of selected items down
Remove groups of selected items
Script for adding items to the list via gui button or other means(menu item)
Script to demonstrate two different actions to take upon selecting an item with single click and double clicks

This list is longer in my head but I will work on it.
_________________
my lame sig

[Laszlo]

What you, Invalid User, describe is mostly the application layer above the low level List function library. They include drag-and-drop addition, making multiple selections in a GUI and acting on them at button press or click, etc. What I could add to the library, are:

Move a list item up/down by a specified number of positions
Move a list item to a new position
Swap 2 items

However, it is not clear how selecting the next/previous item should work. If you mean, returning items from pos+1 or pos-1, it is trivial. If you mean locations relative to the last access point, we need to mark somehow where we were. We must not change the list, and inside a function we don't know the name of a parameter (the list), so we cannot attach a variable to the list, telling the last access point. If there are multiple lists, global variables of fixed names won't help. Hashing the content of the list could give a name for the access point variable, but adding an item to the list invalidates this name. It is also slow, needing a full scan of the list each time we need to find out the location of the last access. If only we could access the memory location or the pointer there where the list is stored...

Mass add: it looks like merging or concatenating lists, and optionally removing repetitions.

Remove items, which contain a specified string: it is a good idea. Useful, for example, to remove files with the extension .bak, .tmp, etc. from a list of files. Especially, when wildcards will be available in AHK.

[Laszlo]

I updated the List functions library List.ahk. The changes are:

[toralf]

Hi Lazlo,

Very nice and usefull functions.

Something that might be an additional usefull function: ListFillControl(ControlName,GuiID,List)
_________________
Ciao
toralf

[Laszlo]

Thanks for the suggestion. What should this function do? Replace commas with pipes? It is one line. What else?

I deliberately left out anything GUI related, since this library provides the low level functions, the building blocks for complex applications with GUI's, file I/O, etc. If they use well tested powerful functions, their development will be faster and less error prone.

[toralf]

You are right, it is just a two line function (StringReplace and GuiControl) Might not be as useful as I thought in the beginning.
_________________
Ciao
toralf

[Laszlo]

Version 1.3 is uploaded. Two functions are changed

[maxinuruguay]

Is there anyway for the library to use a different delimiter? Maybe a global variable to set the delimiter. It would really be of great help to me. Thanks.

[Laszlo]

I uploaded an experimental version to www.hars.us/SW/List1.ahk. It uses the global variable "_" to store the list separator, which can be set to any character, like "_ = `;". (The semicolon needs to be escaped with the back apostrophe.)