Wrap It Up

Wrap It Up!

LabVIEW contains many functions for manipulating strings. These functions can be found in the String palette. With them, you can determine string length, combine two strings, peel off a string subset, convert a string to a number (or vice versa), and many other useful things.

"\" codes display mode allows you to view non-printable characters in strings. And, string controls and indicators have other display options and components to suit your application's needs.

Listboxes and tables allow you to display 2D Arrays of strings, as well as allow users to edit and select subsets of the arrays.

Regular expressions allow you to find anything inside of a string. The Match Pattern function and the more powerful Match Regular Expression function do all the heavy liftingyou just need to know how to create regular expressions in the special "regular expression syntax" to describe the pattern you wish to match.

Using the functions in the File I/O palette, you can write data to or read data from a disk file. Write To Spreadsheet File will save a numerical array as a text spreadsheet string in a file. Read From Spreadsheet File can then read that file back into LabVIEW. You can also read and write dynamic data types with the Write To Measurement File and Read From Measurement File Express VIs. For more advanced applications, you can read and write text files, binary files, and perform low-level file IO.

A special kind of file in software applications is the configuration file (sometimes called INI file). LabVIEW gives you a set of functions for creating, reading, and writing your own configuration files.

Congratulations! Go out and celebrate today! You've mastered the fundamentals of LabVIEW! You have a strong foundation now and should have the background to investigate almost any LabVIEW topic that interests you. The "Advanced" section of this book, coming up next, will teach you about many of the very cool, more complex features LabVIEW contains that make your programming job easier, so stay tuned for more exciting LabVIEW adventures!