How to return a string without trailing spaces

[Li_Dong]

Dear all,

I would like to write a function that will return a string, but I do not want the string contains trailing spaces. How could I do it? Thanks!

[JVanB]

You could write a specification function that computes the length of the function result. Sometimes this isn't feasible, though, for example when the function returns the next line of input. In this case the function result may be declared as allocatable length. In either case the interface must be explicit in the calling program unit.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

You can also do it with a function that returns a deferred-length allocatable character result.

[Li_Dong]

You can also do it with a function that returns a deferred-length allocatable character result.

Can you give me an example solution of this: character(1000) function foo() foo = "abc" end function foo where I would like foo() to return "abc", not "abc" with huge number of spaces.

[Steven_L_Intel1 · Accepted solution]

function foo() character(:), allocatable :: foo foo = "abc" end function foo You must have an explicit interface for this visible to the caller - the easiest way to do that is to put the function in a module and then USE the module in the program units where you want to call the function. Please note also that you need a reasonably current compiler (12.1 minimum, I think), for this to work.

[Li_Dong]

Thank you, Steve!

[Li_Dong]

I am still having a problem as: function foo() character(:), allocatable :: foo character(1000) bar bar = "abc" foo = trim(bar) end function foo The content of foo still includes trailing spaces.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I tried it and it worked correctly for me. Here's the test program I used and its output: print '(A,A,A)', '*',foo(),'*' contains function foo() character(:), allocatable :: foo character(10) bar bar = "abc" foo = trim(bar) end function foo end *abc*

[Li_Dong]

Thanks, again! "ifort" can behave properly, but "gfortran" still add the trailing spaces!