[jawsscripts] determining the first, (leftMost,) character of a string?

  • From: "Geoff personal" <gch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <jawsscripts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 14:44:55 +1100

Guys, I'm wondering which optimal function I might use to determine the 
leftMost character of a string?

What I want to do, is take a numeric string, which may or may not start with 
a decimal point, which always represents a price of a product. then, if it 
does begin with a decimal point, I want to add a 0 plus the dollar character 
to it, so that jaws speaks it as xx cents, properly, which it does if the 0 
is inserted between the dollar character, and the decimal point. although it 
doesn't seem to in this outlook express program!
but normally, if the string ends up as

$.05

Jaws will speak this as, "dollar. zero five."
whereas if I make the string,

$0.05

then jaws seems to speak this properly as, 5 cents.

so, which functions might I optimally do this with?

I have looked through the string functions that I can see, and none seem to 
do this in an elegant way that I can see?
I was hoping for something like StringFirstChar,

or something like that, but I can't find anything that looks remotely like 
it could do what I want? which is simply just to check the first leftMost 
character of a string.

the closest I've been able to half see which I thought with some 
monipulation, might, be able to be made to do this,
was a function called
stringLeft

and I thought I could use it as below, because it says it returns the string 
with the number of characters listed as the second parameter in the above 
function, but, compiler complains of syntax error in Elif Condition.
S I'm obviously using it incorrectly somehow? any clues on proper usage of 
this function greatly appreciated.
The faulty code I've got appears below:


if sValue == "" then



; it's blank so don't add dollar to it as it wil speak unnecessarily, 
substitute speaking the product from table instead,

; because that's what type of credit it will be.



SayString (sProduct)



; now check if first char is decimal point, and if so, after it being 
extracted by below function, add it back in,

; but also add 0 to it so jaws speaks it properly.

ElIf StringLeft (sValue, 1) == . then

; above line is the one compiler baulks at.

sayString ("Decimal point found!"



; starts with decimal point so now add the point back in but add 0 to the 
front as well before dollar sign so it speaks properly.



SayString ("$0." + sValue)



else ; doesn't start with decimal so no need to fiddle with it before adding 
the dollar sign



SayString ("$" + sValue)



EndIf ; sValue firstChar decimal point, or string blank check.



Thanks.



Geoff c.

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