Python length of a "string"

len(object)

Formatting strings in IDL

Just a quick dump of links that I searched to get a handle on IDL's syntax for formatting strings.

These two may have been the best pages, with examples that show the nearly but not quite C-like formatting methods and a nice table of the format codes:

http://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/idl_html_help/C_printf-Style_Quoted_String_Format_Code.html

http://star.pst.qub.ac.uk/idl/Format_Codes.html

This one showed one example of how to print an array to a file with formatting:

http://www.cis.rit.edu/class/simg211/datao.html

For a beginner's guide, this page was surprisingly useless:

http://www.stsci.edu/hst/training/events/IDLTopics/SSD98IDL/IDL_dataio.html#Writing%20Formatted%20Data

Here's the whole damn manual:

http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr511/IDLresources/getting-started-IDL-v7.0.pdf

MATLAB concatinate strings trailing space

Concatinating strings is easy with result = strcat(s1,s2,...sN) except that strcat trims trailing space from each string, ruining attempts at formatting. The solution is to think in terms of MATLAB's array addition. In this case, you simply declare result = [s1 s2 ... SN].

http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/strcat.html