## Copyright (C) 2000  Bill Lash
##
## This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
## it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
## the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
## (at your option) any later version.
##
## This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
## but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
## GNU General Public License for more details.
##
## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
## along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
## Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

## usage: strncmp (s1, s2, n)
##
## Compare the first n characters of two strings, returning 1 if
## they are the same, and 0 otherwise.
##
## Note: For compatibility with Matlab, Octave's strncmp function
## returns 1 if the strings are equal, and 0 otherwise.  This is
## just the opposite of the corresponding C library function.

## Author: Bill Lash (lash@tellabs.com)

function status = strncmp(s1, s2, n)

  if (nargin != 3)
    usage ("strncmp (s, t, n)");
  endif

  status = 0;		# Assume strings are different
  if (isstr (s1) && isstr(s2))
    c1 = columns (s1);
    c2 = columns (s2);
    if (n < 1)		
			# Comparing less than 1 character of the string
      status = 0;	# will always say they are not equal (for Matlab
		        # compatibility

    elseif ((n <= c1) && (n <= c2))
       status = strcmp(s1(:,1:n),s2(:,1:n));
    else 
       status = 0;
    endif
  endif

endfunction