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Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Pattern: .* tells you (.*$.*$) '.*'

Isn't firing for tells like these:

Kadence tells you 'oh?'

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 5:33 pm

Because of the brackets and spaces that aren't optional. The minimum your pattern will match is " tells you () ''", which doesn't match that tell. Use one of the more complex patterns we suggested.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

So something like:

Enchanter Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Canada

If its just a regular trigger something like

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 8:17 pm

Couple of problems with that:

You haven't closed all the brackets (or parens if you like :P) that you've opened. Your pattern doesn't include the speech part of the pattern, between the quotes, but does include the end of the line, so it's going to fail there too.

I suggested a pattern in another thread (don't remember which one, you've started a few :P) that worked for tells to you in languages and your tells to people and your group. I know that one works fine for all your different kinds of tells because I tested it with the text you gave.

EDIT: Ninja'd by Dhark. Just for clarification, I was talking to the OP.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Alright, the one I took was from a larger one that you posted, probably explaining the unclosed brackets. At this point, there have been so many versions posted that I'm not sure which you refer to. But I may uninstall and reinstall CMUD anyways.

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 8:56 pm

Post the one you're using, and I'll tell you if it'll work or not, but the one you took that part from is the one I'm talking about, IIRC.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

The one I'm using isn't working Razz

Enchanter Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Canada

Post it anyways then we'll have a starting point.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

I'm going to revert back to something simple

* tells you (*) '*'|* tells you '*'

Wizard Joined: 17 Jun 2006 Posts: 1201

That may be simple but it's about the worst thing you can do. Everyone showed you how to match the pattern.

First of all though, you should clarify a couple things.

1. At the beginning of the pattern the name of the person telling you, is it always one word like Bob tells you or do they have titles attached or multiple words like Bob, the warrior?

2. Where you have (*) for the type of language, is the language always one word like Elvish or can it be more than one word like Northern Elvish?

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Language is always one word so far as I know. Name is always one word.

I don't want to use something I don't understand.

Adept Joined: 21 Sep 2005 Posts: 250 Location: Austin, TX

The reason that oldguy2 calls that pattern 'the worst' is simply that it will be VERY slow, both to match or to reject a match, because of all the greedy '*' quantifiers. If you know that, say, the name at the beginning of the line is always a single word, you can replace that '*' with a regex that will match only letters ('%w' in zScript patterns, or \w in a regex), and the whole thing will be a lot faster.

So, let's tackle this step-by-step. You want to match:

The beginning of the line
Followed by a name, consisting of a single word
Followed by the literal string 'tells you'
Optionally followed by a language name, consisting of one word surrounded by parens
Followed by an arbitrary string surrounded by single-quotes
Followed by the end of the line

right?

I'm going to do this in a regex, rather than a zScript pattern, simply because I'm more familiar with them. I will also explain my thinking in extreme detail.

Step #1 - Match the beginning of the line. That's easy, it's just the special character '^'. So far, so good.

Step #2 - Match a name, consisting of a single word. Well, we could use '.*', which will match any string of characters. However, that will also match a lot of other things, and it's horribly inefficient as well. So let's use something more specific.

Wait, wait, you say....why is it inefficient? Because '*' is a greedy quantifier - it tries to match as long a string as possible, and only gives up a character at a time if it fails. So, using '.*' will cause the regex engine to absorb the entire rest of the subject string, then try to match the rest of the regex. If that doesn't work, it will put back the LAST character that the '.*' absorbed, then try to match the rest of the regex again. If that also fails, it will put back one more character, and try to match the rest of the regex. And so on, and so on. As you can see, it could do a LOT of work to decide that something doesn't match. Or even to figure out what DOES match.

So...what would be better? Well, we know that the name is a single word, consisting of letters, and no spaces. To do so, first we figure out a regex that will match ONE letter. That's easy: '[a-zA-Z]' will do the trick. Or we can use the shorthand '\w', which will actually match any letter, digit, or the underscore ('_') character. We want to match one or more of those characters in a row, so we put the '+' quantifier after the letter. Put it all together, and we have '\w+', which will match a single word.

So, our whole pattern now is

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

This looks helpful, I'll read it when I get more time :)

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Wow, it is simple. I feel a it stupid. I'll still make many errors I'm sure. But I have a better grip on it now. Thanks.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

odd...

#REGEX Ding on Tell {^(\w+) tells you (?:$(\w+)$ )?'(.*)'$} {#play C:\WINDOWS\Media\ding.wav} {General Triggers}

doesn't put it in the General Triggers class, it makes a new one with the command as the name??

Enchanter Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Canada

Try

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Hmm, I figured CMUD was fine with white space. I'll try it.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

oh wait, that was the one that worked!

It's this one...

#REGEX Tell Capture {^(\w+) tells you (?:$(\w+)$ )?'(.*)'$} {#CAP Tells} {General Captures}

Oh no, it was the one. But this one didn't work either, same problem I suppose.

Enchanter Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Canada

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Hmm... so I tried to make my own with this info:

#REGEX You_Tell {^You tell \w+ ($\w+$ )? '.*'$} {#CAP Tells} {General Captures}

But it doesn't work...

You tell Kadence (Elvish) 'blah'

doesn't work.

Enchanter Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Canada

Use a regex similar to your "Tell Capture" trigger

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

all I say see that's different is the ?: what makes it so crucial?

Enchanter Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Canada

You're correct you just had an extra space in your pattern
the \) )? instead of \))?

or you could look at it like you had an extra space after the \) )?

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

I put the space in because of the earlier mentioned thing about spaces being optional... why was it wrong?