I have used GCC C for years to write a number of programs for work and play and it is great but I think I am needing to branch out a bit as my latest project is causing me fits.
I have a scanner radio receiver that uses RS-232 to communicate with the computer and I got that part of things to work well. Here's the problem. The radio receives commands via CSV strings as in sin,abc,def,1,7,8,etc,etc\r and its output is also CSV as in sin,err\r or sin,lot,of,variables,to,read\r I also got that working such that it could read the response and break out all the CSV variables in to separate strings. In other words, it does work and with gdb, one can trouble-shoot it fairly easily. I have this nagging feeling, though, that there may be a better way to write this program since C is not as good at string manipulation as some other languages. In my program, you have to do a lot of grunt work just to be sure that the 15TH field really is the 15TH field in the string one is sending out. In the standard set of tools that are free and found on most Unix systems, which language such as perl, python, etc can handle rS-232 gracefully and do strings without having to reen vent the wheel? I had this epiphany after spending most of last weekend and early this morning digging through this program I had written only to find that the reason things weren't working was that it appears that I sent out a CSV string with some of the variables shifted by a couple of spaces. I can easily fix that, but it got me to thinking. If I can do all of this within one language, including the RS-232 coms, that will be great. Thanks for any suggestions. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201108301308.p7ud8ptl087...@x.it.okstate.edu