This command structure allows a series of nested commands to be repeated as long as a specific string of characters (the search string) is found within another string (the target string). After each iteration, the target string contains all the data between occurrences of the search string, excluding the search string. Once the loop is over, target contains the remaining characters of the original data.
search( target, search )
…
endsearch()
target
Name of a variable of type string in which to perform the search.
search
String value to search for.
This example splits a string delimited with semi-colons.
In the OnReadDataPage event of the user-defined emulation, the &str system variable contains each new line of data being fed to the document. Also, do not assign anything to the variable while inside the search-endsearch loop; it will get overwritten.
define(&v1,string,'This;is;a;test') %Create the variable
search(&v1,';') %Start loop
show(&v1) %Show token
crlf() %Skip line
endsearch()
show(&v1) %Show remaining text