[TF] "north east west" -> "NEW" ?

[johans at stack.nl (J. v. Selst)]

Phil Gregory wrote:
> In Perl, it'd be a simple 's/\b(\w)\w*\W+/$1/g', but tf does not seem
> blessed with such things, and I'm at a loss as to a good way to proceed.
> Any suggestions?

To replace a string of words by the first letter of every word, you can
do something like:

	/def lfirst =
		/let s=%;\
		/while ({#}) \
			/let s=$[strcat(s, substr({1}, 0, 1))]%;\
			/shift%;\
		/done%;\
		/result s

This obviously has nothing todo with PCRE's anymore; and I don't think
TF 4 has an option to do regular expression substitutions like sed or
perl will offer you.

The mysterious TF 5 and the package at
http://tf-macros.sourceforge.net/packages/ do support PCRE-like
matching, but I'm not sure if these offer substitutions in a similar
way as well...


Ciao,
Johan