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Page I. Home. Page III.

List Manipulation - Page II.

We've now managed to extract elements from a list, but what do you do
if you want to create a new list. Let's say you have two elements :

	(setq a 200.0)
	(setq b 400.0)

You want to combine them to create a new list. To do this you would use the "List" function. For example :

	(setq c (list a b))

Would return :

	(200.0 400.0)

You could also write the function like this :

	(setq c '(a b))

Here's an example of List Manipulation. We are going to use the (car), (cadr) and (list) function to draw a rectangle.

(defun c:rec ( / pt1 pt2 pt3 pt4)

	(setq pt1 (getpoint "\nSelect First Corner: "))
	;get the first point

	(setq pt3 (getcorner pt1 "\nSelect Second Corner: "))
	;get the third point

	(setq pt2 (list (car pt1) (cadr pt3)))
	;construct the second point

	(setq pt4 (list (car pt3) (cadr pt1)))
	;construct the fourth point

	(command "Line" pt1 pt2 pt3 pt4 "c")
	;draw the rectangle

  (princ)

);defun
;**********************************************************

Let's look closer at the line :

	(setq pt2 (list (car pt1) (cadr pt3)))

This function retrieves the first element (x coordinate) from the list pt1, the second element (y coordinate) from the list pt3, creates a list from these elements and stores the list in the variable pt2.
The following diagram should help you to better understand this.

Rectangle

 


AutoLisp provides other functions to manipulate lists. Let's have a look at some of them.

Append

This takes any number of lists and runs them together as one list :

	(append '(12.0 15.5) '("M20" "M30))

Would return :
	
	(12.0 15.5 "M20" "M30")

Last

Will return the last element of a list :

	(last '("M20" "M24" "M30"))

Would return :

	("M30")

Length

This returns an integer indicating the number of elements in a list :

	(length '("M20" "M24" "M30"))

Should return :

	(3)

Member

This function searches a list for a specific element. If found it returns the element plus the remainder of the list :

	(member 'c '(a b c d e f))

would return :

	(c d e f)

Reverse

Returns a list with it's elements reversed :

	(reverse '(a b c d e f))

Will Return :

	(f e d c b a)

Subst

Searches a list for an old element and returns a copy of the list with the new item substituted in place of every occurrence of the old item :

	Syntax : (subst newitem olditem lst)

	(setq lst '(a b c d e c)))

	(subst 'f 'c lst)

Would return

	(a b f d e f)

On the next page we will have a look at a more advanced List Manipulation Example.

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