Please Help: working with text waves

For task 1 I would create a semicolon separated string that is a list containing the name of each of the text waves you want to concatenate. Then use the Concatenate operation (with /NP=0) to concatenate all of the waves into one.

To get all of the unique values, I would first sort the wave and then use Extract/INDX to get a wave containing the indexes into the text wave that are unique. Then create a new text wave with that many points and assign the values.

Here's some example code that creates some fake data and finds the unique string values:

Note that if you were using Igor 8 or later you could replace the sort, extract, and wave assignment with a simple call to FindDuplicates/RT

Also note that if you want to treat molecular formulas that use different cases as different (eg. h2o and H2O are different) you'll need to change the 3rd parameter to CmpStr from 0 to 1.

For your second task I don't understand what you're trying to do. The sample code you provided looks ok if the wave named sample is a text wave. It might help if you provided enough code so we could actually execute the code. We'd also need the data waves (or some way to generate fake data).

If you had access to the Igor Pro 9 beta, it's possible that the new TextHistogram operation would be useful here.

Here is a function to remove duplicates. It has some additional functionality, but could be simplified to do only what you need by removing the wave reference wave.

This was very helpful. Thank you. I now have a concatenated master list with unique formula names. Step 1, check.

A little further clarification on the second part. I now need to create a "sample abundance" wave for each sample with the same number of points as my unique master list of formulas. I need to fill in the abundance values for each formula in that sample. This should be simple using FindValue, but I am again getting an error because of the text wave. It's like Igor doesn't know my "uniqueStrings" wave in the function is a text wave, and I don't know why. How can I get it to recognize it is a text wave!?

Here is the code I am trying. This would be used to generate one complete sample wave with abundances filled in for each formula. Wave Key: SampleForm is the wave with all chemical formulas identified in that sample; SampleAbund is the corresponding abundance of that formula in the sample; unique strings is the "master" list of all unique formulas identified in all samples; SampleAbund_master is the wave I am trying to fill in. 

I am getting an error with this code at the point, "store=uniqueStrings[i]" because Igor says it needs a string value. I was trying this approach because when I tried "FindValue/TEXT=uniqueStrings[i] sampleForm" I was getting the same error.

Function SampleFill(SampleForm, SampleAbund)

wave SampleForm
wave SampleAbund

wave uniqueStrings
wave SampleAbund_master
variable i
string store

make/O/N=(numpnts(uniqueStrings)) SampleAbund_master

For(i=0;i<(numpnts(uniqueStrings));i+=1)

    store=uniqueStrings[i]

    FindValue/TEXT=store sampleForm
    
    If(V_Value>-1)
    
    SampleAbund_master[i]=sampleAbund[V_Value]
    
    Else
    
    SampleAbund_master[i]=NaN
        
    EndIf
EndFor

edit SampleAbund_master
End

text waves should be declared as wave /T

Your input text wave needs to be declared using the /T flag:

Your uniqueStrings wave also needs Wave/T.

At compile time, Igor doesn't know the type of the wave that will be passed in. By default, the compiler assumes numeric.

YES! It worked. Thank you. I didn't realize I could assign it as a text wave with just wave/T. This will make my life so much easier in the future. 

Now that you've been through some of these problems, and successfully solved them, this help section may make more sense that it did the first time through: DisplayHelpTopic "Accessing Global Variables And Waves"