Array of Strings in Fortran 77

I've a question about Fortran 77 and I've not been able to find a solution.

I'm trying to store an array of strings defined as the following:

character matname(255)*255

Which is an array of 255 strings of length 255.

Later I read the list of names from a file and I set the content of the array like this:

matname(matcount) = mname

EDIT: Actually mname value is hardcoded as mname = 'AIR' of type character*255, it is a parameter of a function matadd() which executes the previous line. But this is only for testing, in the future it will be read from a file.

Later on I want to print it with:

write(*,*) matname(matidx)

But it seems to print all the 255 characters, it prints the string I assigned and a lot of garbage.

So that is my question, how can I know the length of the string stored?
Should I have another array with all the lengths?
And how can I know the length of the string read?

Thanks.

Solution

The function Timotei posted will give you the length of the string as long as the part of the string you are interested in only contains spaces, which, if you are assigning the values in the program should be true as FORTRAN is supposed to initialize the variables to be empty and for characters that means a space.

However, if you are reading in from a file you might pick up other control characters at the end of the lines (particularly carriage return and/or line feed characters, \r and/or \n depending on your OS). You should also toss those out in the function to get the correct string length. Otherwise you could get some funny print statements as those characters are printed as well.

Here is my version of the function that checks for alternate white space characters at the end besides spaces.

  function strlen(st)
  integer           i,strlen
  character         st*(*)
  i = len(st)
  do while ((st(i:i).eq.' ').or.(st(i:i).eq.'\r').or.
 +  (st(i:i).eq.'\n').or.(st(i:i).eq.'\t'))
    i = i - 1
  enddo
  strlen = i
  return
  end

If there are other characters in the "garbage" section this still won't work completely.

Assuming that it does work for your data, however, you can then change your write statement to look like this:

write(*,*) matname(matidx)(1:strlen(matname(matidx)))

and it will print out just the actual string.

As to whether or not you should use another array to hold the lengths of the string, that is up to you. the strlen() function is O(n) whereas looking up the length in a table is O(1). If you find yourself computing the lengths of these static strings often, it may improve performance to compute the length once when they are read in, store them in an array and look them up if you need them. However, if you don't notice the slowdown, I wouldn't worry about it.