<p>Well done Glen for sorting this out! I think the OP in fact got good advice in the very first comment&mdash;to clarify their question, that questions purely on programming are for SO, &amp; even what function to look into using&mdash;but they didn't know how to act on it. One, hopefully uncontroversial, lesson we can learn from this straight away is to take especial care to explain to new users what they should do &amp; what will happen next: "Edit your question to make clear [...] &amp; then, if it is purely to do with programming, it can be migrated to SO."</p>
