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Wanderer Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 96

I am new to regex, but I am learning the value of it's power.

I am not sure what I am doing wrong, but the following isn't working.

#SHOW %regex("general area of The Elemental Canyon for","general area of (\w+) for",questarea,X)

I am assuming \w+ matches 1 or more words, but it's not capturing anything. If I remove the 'for' from both the pattern and the regex pattern it works, but only captures the 'The'.

-Rappy

Posted: Wed Nov 05, 2008 6:25 pm

No, \w+ matches one or more word characters. \w on its own matches any single word character - a-z and 0-9 are considered word characters in this context, so \w will match any single letter or integer between 0 and 9. The + modifier matches 1 or more of the previous character, so \w+ will match one or more characters or numbers, but it will NOT match spaces. To include spaces in the match, you want to use a character range. You do this by putting the characters you want to match inside square brackets. So [\w ] will match a single word character (a-z0-9) or space. [\w ]+ will match multiple word characters or spaces, and thus multiple words.

In short, use [\w ]+ instead.

See also this.

Wanderer Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 96

Thanks, that works perfectly.

This cut my %pos code from 8 lines down to 1 %regex line.

-Rappy

Wanderer Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 96

Another question that's sort of on the same subject. How can I #MAPQUERY a value with ' in the query? I am capturing the above with a regex trigger and wanting to mapquery the room, but the room can contain the ' character which causes the SQL query to fail, yet when I query in the Find Room dialog in the mapper, it has no problem.

-Rappy

Magician Joined: 28 Jan 2007 Posts: 430

You have to replace the ' with quotes within the query.

For example, part of a map query I used extensively in one of the MUDs I used to play, looks like this:

Wanderer Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 96

Interesting, replaceing a single ' with a two ' worked. Why is that?

-Rappy

Posted: Thu Nov 06, 2008 1:11 am

Because that's what you're supposed to do - Prognoi's explanation was incorrect, but his example was right. If you select the text, you'll see that the %replace function is changing each single apostrophe into two, which is what you're meant to do.

Magician Joined: 28 Jan 2007 Posts: 430

Indeed, I realized that later, but was sort of in a hurry when wrote it anyway.

To my defence, I've never been able to fully explain it to myself, either.

Thinking about replacing apostrophe with quote is easier to memorize (and that's how I write it in code, too), albeit wrong.