From: William James <w_a_x_man@...>
Date: 2007-09-19T23:40:04+09:00
Subject: Re: finding string matches, in order, in a file

On Sep 19, 7:03 am, Peter Bailey <pbai...@bna.com> wrote:

> I'm getting exactly what you predict. And, . . ., perhaps I haven't made
> this clear, but, I am getting healthy output from my script. I'm getting
> 208 lines of data. Each line is an entry between the <issue> entries
> I've described. They're just totally out of order! That's my problem.
> Here are the first 5 entries I get back:
> Immigration
> Health Issues
> Copyright/Patent/Trademark
> Budget/Appropriations
> Health Issues
> ..

Very odd.  "scan" will return the strings in the order that
they are found.

How did your program read the file?  Could its contents have
been disordered somehow?  After your program reads the file
into a string, have it write the string to a temp file and
then use fc or diff to compare the 2 files.

"Health Issues" appears twice; I presume the file contains
two entries.

You've probably had your editor do a string search to verify
that "Immigration" isn't the first entry in the file.