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➜ MUSHclient
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➜ Asterisks: Convert To Regexp
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Asterisks: Convert To Regexp
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| Posted by
| Xvordan
(29 posts) Bio
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| Date
| Mon 11 Apr 2016 11:08 PM (UTC) |
| Message
| | Whenever I have a trigger/etc pattern which contains actual asterisks, the convert to regular expression function wants to represent them as (.*)? rather than as \*. Is there any reason that I'm missing for this behavior? (.*)? looks weird and inaccurate (at best) to me. I always have to go through the converted string and change the results to \*. | | Top |
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| Posted by
| Nick Gammon
Australia (23,165 posts) Bio
Forum Administrator |
| Date
| Reply #1 on Tue 12 Apr 2016 01:19 AM (UTC) Amended on Tue 12 Apr 2016 03:00 AM (UTC) by Nick Gammon
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| Message
| The behaviour is correct. First, you need to make a "capture" which is why the brackets are there. If you don't happen to want a capture then you can omit the brackets.
For example:
Match: punch * (non-regexp)
Match: punch (.*?) (regexp)
Send: punch %1
The asterisk represents the capture into wildcard %1.
However if you just happen to have variable stuff that doesn't need capturing then .* is OK.
The "?" makes the wildcard non-greedy.
See my page about regular expressions: http://www.gammon.com.au/regexp
Groups and tagged expressions
The default behaviour is for each group to be returned as a "wildcard" for the trigger or alias...
Regexp: tell (.+) (.+)
Match : tell Nick hi there
Wildcard '1' = 'Nick hi'
Wildcard '2' = 'there'
However you can see a problem here, the first wildcard is "Nick hi" where we really want it to be the name. So we need to make it less greedy:
Regexp: tell (.+?) (.+)
Match : tell Nick hi there
Wildcard '1' = 'Nick'
Wildcard '2' = 'hi there'
The default for the non regexp wildcards is non-greedy matches, which is why the convert to regexp does that.
In fact, internally, all non-wildcard matches are converted using the same algorithm, so they are regexps by the time they are used. |
- Nick Gammon
www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com | | Top |
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