Fortran Data Types Accessing character substrings
Example
For the character entity
character(len=5), parameter :: greeting = "Hello"
a substring may be referenced with the syntax
greeting(2:4) ! "ell"
To access a single letter it isn't sufficient to write
greeting(1) ! This isn't the letter "H"
but
greeting(1:1) ! This is "H"
For a character array
character(len=5), parameter :: greeting(2) = ["Hello", "Yo! "]
we have substring access like
greeting(1)(2:4) ! "ell"
but we cannot reference the non-contiguous characters
greeting(:)(2:4) ! The parent string here is an array
We can even access substrings of literal constants
"Hello"(2:4)
A portion of a character variable may also be defined by using a substring as a variable. For example
integer :: i=1
character :: filename = 'file000.txt'
filename(9:11) = 'dat'
write(filename(5:7), '(I3.3)') i
