To: J3                                                     J3/18-127
From: Steve Lionel
Subject: Additional string intrinsics
Date: 2018-February-14

Introduction
------------

String processing has always been a weak point in Fortran,
especially compared to other languages. ISO/IEC 1539-2: 2000
(Varying Length Character Strings, N1375) defined various
procedures, some of which made it into the standard and some
did not.

This paper suggests new intrinsic functions that would be useful
in applications doing string processing.

From N1375 - these are provided as examples of useful functionality,
not necessarily the exact specification desired:

INSERT - Inserts a substring into a string at a specified position.
REMOVE - Removes a specified substring from a string.
REPLACE - Replaces a subset of the characters in a string by a given
substring. The subset may be specified
either by position or by content.
SPLIT - Split a string into substrings based on a delimiter.

Other functions that would be useful:

- Upcase/downcase
- Case-insensitive compare
- Something like PHP's explode/implode that convert a string to/
from an array of strings with a delimiter. The SPLIT interface
might be more practical for Fortran, which doesn't have arrays
of varying-length strings.

Many users have asked for a function like C's sprintf, saying that
internal WRITE is too awkward, especially when one wants to use
it in expressions.