gnuplot: use regular expressions to parse string

Question

Tell me PLZ how in the gnuplot script you can

1) parse a string and extract a number and a letter/string from it?

2) is it possible to use associative arrays so as not to use multi IF?

files = system(sprintf("dir /b \"%s*.csv\"", inputPath))

do for [name in files]{

    # MY TROUBLES IS HERE
    [value, typeID] = parse(name, "*[%d%s]*"); # pseudocode
    typesList = {"h": 3600, "m": 60, "s": 1};

    scale = value * typesList[typeID];
    # MY TROUBLES IS ABOVE

    myfunc(y) = y * scale

    outputName = substr(name, 0, strlen(name) - strlen(".csv"))

    inputFullPath = inputPath.name
    outputFullPath = outputPath.outputName.outputExt

    plot inputFullPath using 1:(myfunc($2)) with lines ls 1 notitle
}

In my case, I need to get the number of seconds from the file name of the form ...[d=17s]..., ...[d=2m]..., ...[d=15h]... etc

In a more complicated case: ...[d = 2h7m31s]... (this is a general case, it is unlikely to be useful to me, but it would be interesting to know how to resolve it)

Answer 1

I came to your post by searching the same objective: grep a pattern in the middle of a file up to a space, to get a list string usable in gnuplot.

new_plan.txt:
blabla CIC1 blabla
blabla CIC2.2-prod blabla
blabla CIC1 blabla
etc.

^ File to parse ^

gnuplot> system("cat new_plan.txt| sed -n -E 's/^.*(CIC\\S*).*$/\\1/p' |sort |uniq")

Result:

CIC1 
CIC2.2-prod

The annoying thing is not-to forget to antislash the antislash \ because it is in a string so that gnuplot can call it with the system call.

I do not answer your title question, but your last comment:

(this is a general case, it is unlikely to be useful to me, but it would be interesting to know how to resolve it)