sprint · strcmp

Strings

See also

• StringFunctions (String Manipulation Class)
  • StringFunctions
    • StringFunctions.len()
    • StringFunctions.substr()
    • StringFunctions.head()
    • StringFunctions.tail()
    • StringFunctions.right()
    • StringFunctions.left()
    • StringFunctions.is_name()
    • StringFunctions.alias()
    • StringFunctions.alias_list()
    • StringFunctions.references()
    • StringFunctions.is_point_process()
    • StringFunctions.is_artificial()
• String Parsing (sscanf)
  • sscanf()

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sprint()

Python

Syntax:

n.sprint(strdef, "format", args)

Description:

Prints to a NEURON (i.e. not Python) string. See printf() for the description of the format.

Example:

from neuron import n

strdef = n.ref('')
n.sprint(strdef, 'There are %d %s.', 3, 'dendrites')
print(strdef[0])

Note

Similar functionality is available for Python strings using the % operator or (for Python 2.6+) a string object’s format method or (for Python 3.6+) with f-strings. As Python strings are immutable, these approaches each create a new string.

We can also use f-strings to update NEURON strings by writing to strdef[0]; for example:

from neuron import n

strdef = n.ref('')
num_parts = 3
part = "dendrites"
strdef[0] = f'There are {num_parts} {part}.'
print(strdef[0])

HOC

Syntax:

sprint(strdef, "format", args)

Description:

Prints to a string. See printf() for the description of the format.

---

strcmp()

Python

Syntax:

x = n.strcmp("string1", "string2")

Description:

Returns negative, 0, or positive value depending on how the strings compare lexicographically. 0 means they are identical. A positive value indicates string1 comes after string2. This is a thin wrapper around the C standard library function strcmp and returns the same values it would return.

Note: string1 and string2 must contain only ASCII characters. All strings (whether or not they contain unicode) may be compared directly in Python via <, >, ==, etc.

For example "apical" < "basal" would return True.

Note that accented characters are not treated as equal to their non-accented counterparts. For example, "soma" == "sóma" would return False. If you wish for accented and non-accented characters to be compared equal, one solution would be to use the third-party unidecode module, available via pip install unidecode, to remove accents before running the comparison.

HOC

Syntax:

x = strcmp("string1", "string2")

Description:

return negative, 0, or positive value depending on how the strings compare lexicographically. 0 means they are identical.