Zugg Software :: View topic - Regex

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

How do I make this:

#TRIGGER sleep {^You go to sleep(?: .*(\w+)|)\.$} {posn=sleep;bed=%1} {General Triggers}

Enter in as a regex pattern (you know when you can select it at the bottom of the gui.

Also, it is only taking the last letter, not last word. But I'm not versed enough in regex yet to know why.

Wizard Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 1113 Location: USA

Use #REGEX instead of #TRIGGER.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

So it just registers as a regex trigger that way?

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Also, isn't \w supposed to be %w?

Wizard Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 1113 Location: USA

Yes. You can use #TRIGGER {pattern} {command} {class} {regex} to setup a regex trigger, but it's easier to just use #REGEX instead.

No. In regex, \w represents a "word-type character" (alphanumeric, basically). The %w is for the zMUD patterns, which are not regex.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Still confused as to why it's only taking the last letter.

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

Because thats what you told it to do Wink

The .* in your pattern means match as many characters (except newline) as you can without breaking the rest of the pattern (Its greedy).
\w+ means match at least one word character and as many word characters as you can without breaking the rest of the pattern(also greedy).
So .* matches every character it can after sleep until the last character before the period.
It leaves that character because that will still allow \w+ to match.

To capture the last word on a line that begins with You go to sleep and ends with a period
try this pattern

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Thanks

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

No problem.
If there is a possibility that the final word might include an apostrophe.
change the pattern to

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 10:32 am

That seems a bit complex when all you need to do is change .* to .*? to make the * non-greedy.

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

You're correct that is simpler, much nicer to look at, but less efficient as regexes go.
In this case it's probably a much better choice since Chamenas was already confused.