But, the development of three special techniques has changed my mind. The approach I have taken is identical to that taught you in the first grade. Further, if you have been exposed to the so called 'new math', you may remember the idea of using a 'number line' in figuring out what the result of adding 6 plus 8 was. For those who don't know what I mean, the idea is to rule off a line with one tick for each digit. Then to add, the ticks for each number are merely counted off the line in sequence.
Any first grader can do it.
I found that padding simplifies the parsing process. Done Padding Padding a number was a complex task until I stumbled on a very simple algorithm built around the characteristics of the question mark wildcard in a filespec. I previously approached this problem by counting the characters already in the string on the way to figuring out how many padding characters were needed. This insures the name will always be at least eight characters long. It's amazing to me how a mere change of perspective made a seemingly complex problem so easy to handle.