Introducing... Darren's Weekly Nugget! 1/16/2006

[Darren]

Hello all,

After casually mentioning a performance tip in this thread last week, I was encouraged by a few forum members to start posting a "weekly nugget" to the forums...you know, some cool feature or technique in LabVIEW that might be helpful to your average user. I lay no claims to originality, so forgive me if I post something that has already been posted before. In this inaugural nugget thread, I will post two nuggets...one of which is the suggestion from the aforementioned thread.

Nugget: If you are searching a string for a simple character, or set of characters, use the Search/Split String function in the String > Additional String Functions palette. This function is more efficient for simple character matching than Match Pattern. Only use Match Pattern if you are actually utilizing its pattern-matching capabilities, i.e. if you're searching for something like \.[Tt][Xx][Tt]$. If you're searching for "txt", just use Search/Split String.

Nugget: Even somebody who's been programming in LabVIEW for a long time (7 years for me) still learns something new every once in a while. I just found out last week that if you hold down "Ctrl" when you double-click a subVI, both the front panel AND the block diagram of the subVI will open. I definitely prefer this method over the Double-click > Ctrl-E that I always used to do to show a subVI's diagram!

Each Monday I will post a new thread with my weekly nugget. I'm hoping some or most of the LabVIEW forum community will find them useful.

-D

[tst]

Back when... we started the interesting stuff threads in the BreakPoint exactly to catch things like this, so that they wouldn't disappear in a board which gets hundreds of posts a day. These tips would be useful if they were collected in a single place.

Which way do you think is best:

a) post all the tips to this thread, making it very long if people reply,

b) post a new thread for each tip and link to them in a single thread in the BreakPoint or

c) post them to the Breakpoint in the first place?

Maybe a thread similar to the LAVA forums thread of cool tricks would be a good idea?

What do people think?

BTW, Darren, every once in a while we mention the need for someone to answer the "why?" questions. Questions which are more in-depth and may require some digging up. These questions don't surface all the time, but it would be nice if we had some organized channel which we could use to pass such questions to R&D. Maybe you, Ben, Molly and Philip can come up with such a mechanism? What do you think? 

And last thing, Kudos and thanks! A good idea!

[Darren]

Hi tst,

I will be posting these nuggets each week in a new thread in the LabVIEW forum...that way each nugget can have its own set of replies, in case anybody wants to discuss or ask more questions about them (although most will probably be pretty simple).  If somebody wants to maintain a thread in Breakpoint linking to all of them, that's cool.

As for the "in depth" questions, I think Philip would probably be the best point man for that operation.

-D

[Ben]

Hi All,

First let me congratulate Darren on his promotion to "Proven Active Regular". It takes a lot of guts to climb out of that hole!

Please keep these nuggets coming!

tst,

I think your "Interesting threads" thead was custom made for just this type of thread. I will let you do the honors. If you want to open a discusion of this topic, start a new thread in the Break Point and ask Molly to do an anouncment.

Your "in-depth" idea is very timely. Please contact Philip to share your thoughts.

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 01-16-2006 02:43 PM

[tst]

---

@Ben wrote:

I think your "Interesting threads" thead was custom made for just this type of thread. I will let you do the honors. If you want to open a discusion of this topic, start a new thread in the Break Point and ask Molly to do an anouncment.

Your "in-depth" idea is very timely. Please contact Philip to share your thoughts.

---

I don't want to "pollute" the interesting stuff thread by adding a link to it every week. That thread is a good repository for links and if it's too big we wouldn't be able to find the interesting stuff later. If anything, I would prefer having a single thread in the breakpoint to follow these and maybe point to that thread from Darren's posts. Then he will also be able to point to that thread in each of his posts for "past issues". I will leave it to Darren to start that thread.

It seems that the "tricks" thread from the LAVA board didn't make it to the interesting stuff thread. I will have to chase it down and link to it.

As for Philip, unlike you power users, I don't have the personal emails and phones of every mover and shaker at NI. I'm just a lowly user. I look to you to represent the interests of the interested enthusiasts. BTW, I left that cramped hotmail box and you can now find me at hthr44 @ gmail.com (another anti-spam address).

[tst]

OK, I created the history thread here.

BTW, Darren, if you have any interesting LV behind-the-scenes stories or would like to bring in guest columnists, I would be happy to read them.

[Ray.R]

Thanks Darren,

I didn't want to write anything to this thread when I first saw it in the morning.  (I thought you'd prefer stars anyway).  😉

I do like the idea about starting a new thread each week.  It allows people to ask questions about your "Nuggets".

Thanks,

Ray

[Philip_Courtois]

Great idea Darren,

Your Weekly Nugget will from now on be posted on the LabVIEW Zone too - including a link to the Nugget thread.

[Ben]

Darren wrote in Nugget 0 (N0)

"

Nugget: If you are searching a string for a simple character, or set of characters, use the Search/Split String function in the String > Additional String Functions palette. This function is more efficient for simple character matching than Match Pattern. Only use Match Pattern if you are actually utilizing its pattern-matching capabilities, i.e. if you're searching for something like \.[Tt][Xx][Tt]$. If you're searching for "txt", just use Search/Split String.
"

So I was experimenting to see how I could make use of this nugget (N0).

The attached searches a large array of random strings for a character string match.

By conducting two "screeening checks" using the "Search/Split String" I was able to increase the performance by a factor of 8 over a raw search.

I like N0.

Anyone else have interesting twists on N0?

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 01-16-2006 07:27 PM

[Ray.R]

Say what??? Ben????

You mean to tell me that by using this method, that it was 8 times fatser than the conventional Match Pattern... ??? ...

I will have to try it.. 

Did you say 8 times????

(do I sound like St-Thomas... or tst??)  😉

wow!....