Book Image

Tcl/Tk 8.5 Programming Cookbook

Book Image

Tcl/Tk 8.5 Programming Cookbook

Overview of this book

With Tcl/Tk, you can create full-featured cross-platform applications in a simple and easy-to-understand way without any expensive development package; the only tools required are a simple text editor and your imagination. This practical cookbook will help you to efficiently interact with editors, debuggers, and shell type interactive programs using Tcl/Tk 8. This cookbook will comprehensively guide you through practical implementation of Tcl/Tk 8.5 commands and tools. This book will take you through all the steps needed to become a productive programmer in Tcl/Tk 8. Right from guiding you through the basics to creating a stand-alone application, it provides complete explanation of all the steps along with handy tips and tricks. The book begins with an introduction to the Tcl shell, syntax, variables, and programming best practices in the language. It then explores procedures and the flow of events with control constructs followed by advanced error trapping and recovery. From Chapter 4, a detailed study of string expressions and handling enables you to handle various string functions and use lists to expand the string functionality. The book then discusses in-depth the Tcl Dictionary and how to utilize it to store and retrieve data. File operations and Tk GUI handling are covered extensively along with a developing a real-world address book application to practice the concepts learned.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Tcl/Tk 8.5 Programming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Trimming a string


When writing a program, there is no way to ensure that only correctly formatted data is provided. An end-user may inadvertently enter whitespace, a test file may contain whitespaces, and so on. To address this issue, Tcl provides keywords to trim the undesirable whitespaces or characters if specified. The first of these is the trim keyword.

The syntax of the string command is as follows:

string trim string characters

If no characters are provided, the trim keyword will return the string with all leading and trailing whitespace trimmed. If the characters are not specified (specifying the characters is optional), only those whitespaces will be removed.

How to do it…

In the following example, we will trim the .gif extension from a string. Return values from the commands are provided for clarity. Enter the following command:

% string trim "picture.gif " .gif
picture

How it works…

As you can see, Tcl has returned our trimmed string.