## Copyright (C) 2007 Muthiah Annamalai <muthiah.annamalai@uta.edu>
## 
## 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, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
##

## -*- texinfo -*-
## @deftypefn {Function File} @var{rval}= {} strjoin(@var{prefixstr},@var{stringcell})
## @deftypefnx {Function File} @var{rval}= {} strjoin(@var{prefixstr},@var{varargs})
## joins the strings in @var{stringcell} with the @var{prefixstr} like the list-join
## function in Python; the second version allows usage with variable number of arguments.
## Note that, if using cell-array as a second argument, only 2 arguments are accepted.
## Also note that, both the arguments are strings or containers of strings (cells).
##
## @example
## @group
##           strjoin(' loves-> ','marie','amy','beth') 
##           ##returns 'marie loves-> amy loves-> beth'
##
##           strjoin('*',@{'Octave','Scilab','Lush','Yorick'@})
##           ##returns 'Octave*Scilab*Lush*Yorick'
## @end group
## @end example
## @end deftypefn
## @seealso {strcmp}
##

function rval=strjoin(spacer,varargin)
  if (nargin < 2) || (nargin > 2  && iscell(varargin{1}) )
    print_usage();
  end

  if iscell(varargin{1})
     varargin=varargin{1};
  end

  rval="";
  L=length(varargin);
  for idx=1:(L-1)
    rval=strcat(rval,sprintf('%s%s',varargin{idx},spacer));
  end
  rval=strcat(rval,varargin{L});
  return;
end
%!
%!assert(strjoin("-","hello"),"hello")
%!assert(strjoin('*',{'Octave','Scilab','Lush','Yorick'}),'Octave*Scilab*Lush*Yorick')
%!
