Hi Kris,

FORMAT 1 INT will turn your 5.000 into 5 when printed

SVAL(A$) returns a floating point value of the string A$

I hope these help!

Sean

Thanks for your reply ​@Sean Turner.

However, it only helps me partially.

I would need to actually convert, not only print, variable types because I want to pass them as arguments for very different functions.

For instance, either define the detector number as a number and pass it as a filter string argument; or in another approach, define it as a string, and pass it to NSTR, and so forth. I am not sure which approach would be the most convenient so far.

I am also interested if primitive file system manipulations are possible via ZPL, such as creating a new folder, or checking the folder of the current project, and so on.

Does functionality of this sort exists for ZPL?

Thanks for an extensive answer ​@MichaelH!

The command $PATHNAME() did the job, however, it is not documented in OpticStudio. I bet more similar commands are available (for instance, now I wish to check if a specific file already exists in a specified folder), still without using COMMAND. Does a summary of all permitted in-built commands exist somewhere? This would be super useful to know.

Checking if a file already exists is a little bit more difficult with built-in ZPL commands.  You will need to use the FINDFILE keyword and check the length of the filename with the filter:

dir$ = $PATHNAME()
filter$ = dir$ + "\lens.zmx"

FINDFILE tempfile$, filter$
IF SLEN(tempfile$) > 0 
	PRINT "file exists"
ELSE
	PRINT "file does not exist"
ENDIF

The Help Files do list all the commands, but the ZPL section of the PDF version of the Help Files is over 200 pages long, so sometimes it’s a little difficult to find the desired functionality.  I would suggest to search the Help Files and if you can’t figure it out, to simply as the forum.

$PATHNAME is found in The Programming Tab > About the ZPL > String Functions

It would be nice if all numeric functions, string functions, and keywords were in one section.

In order to better search the ZPL section of the help, I like to do the following:

• Open the Help PDF in a browser (Chrome or Edge)
• Determine the first and last page of the ZPL section.  For 2024R2, it starts on page 1478 and ends on 1627
• Click on the Print icon in the browser toolbar
• For the Printer, select Save as PDF and enter the page ranges from above
• Click Save

Now you can search this smaller PDF quicker and more easily.  It’s not a perfect solution because you’ll still need to know what you’re looking for but I find this very helpful when I need to create complex ZPL macros.

Good tip ​@MichaelH! I see that the help file is indeed extensive and lists (probably) all possible ZPL commands. I see no harm in adding this extensive list to the help file as well (i.e. the interactive Windows help system) so that both sources of information - the manual and the help system - would be equivalent.