Appending strings to a textwave??

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Hello there again! I'm here chugging away happily on random coding things and have run into a potential thingie that I want to try to do.
I have this program that, pretty much, fills a wave full of numbers that are each associated with a wave in root:. Ex. I have 20 waves in root, i generate 20 new numbers, each associated with a wave in root:. the way I do this is Not too tricky but the coode is a mess to look at so I don't want to put it here :(. In common language, I use a do-while loop to iterate with a counter and each time the counter runs, the next slot in the destination wave is filled, corresponding to the counter, using wave[i] = sourcewave[0], where imax corresponds to the number of source waves.
to the meat of the question though.
as this fills a master wave up with numerical values, I also want to fill a text wave up with the names of the source waves so I will have one wave that looks like this.

masterWave
3423
545
346
734
57746
8356
373

and a corresponding text wave that looks like this

master textwave
name0
name1
name2
name3
name4
name5
name6

The problem I am running in to is that frmulating text waves is not the same as doing so for normal waves and it seems like I must know what is going to be in all of the spots and can't simply make a wave and fill it with each iteration in a do-while loop. Any input on this would be greatly appreciated. I can certainly answer questions to clarify, and I can also put my ugly code up, but that's hopefully last resort :D
thanks in advance
cory
You just do it in the same way as for your numeric wave. Just assign a string to the ith row of your textwave. The other issue is your do-while approach. If you can predetermine the length of the wave, i.e. how many namex waves you are going to store then you can use for-endfor.
    String wList = WaveList("name*",";","")
    Variable nWaves = ItemsInList(wList)
    Make/O/T/N=(nWaves) masterTextWave // the /T flag tells Igor it's a text wave
    Make/O/N=(nWaves) masterWave
    String wName
    Variable i

    for (i = 0; i < nWaves; i += 1)
        wName = StringFromList(i, wList)
        // store name of wave
        masterTextWave[i] = wName // assign string to ith row of textwave
        // store your info
        Wave w0 = $wName
        masterWave[i] = w0[0]
    endfor


That's untested but you should get the idea from that.

June 13, 2017 at 11:55 am - Permalink

Thank you so much! I'll test it right away... I dunno why I had so much trouble with my same approach previously....hopefully I was just doing something dumb.

June 13, 2017 at 12:23 pm - Permalink

Have you considered using a wave reference wave instead of numbers and text? Something along the lines of:
        //  Defines the data folder to look in
        DFREF MyFolder=root:

        //  Counts the number of waves in the folder
        Variable n=CountObjectsDFR(MyFolder, 1)

        //  Creates a list of all waves in the folder
        Make/O/WAVE/N=(n) MyWaves=WaveRefIndexedDFR(MyFolder, p)


You can then use NameOfWave(MyWaves[i]) to get the names at any point later on, if you for any reason need the names.

June 13, 2017 at 11:30 pm - Permalink