Zugg Software :: View topic - replacing lines of text before they show...

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

IS there a way for me to take a line of text from the MUD and have a trigger capture and replace it before it shows?

So... turning...

Your flaming bite *** DEVESTATES *** a sasquatch.

Into...

Your flaming bite *** DEVESTATES *** a sasquatch. (50) dmg

Would be sort of neat if I could make a database of creatures and their hp as well and have something reference that so I can use the total dmg in something like...

Your flaming bite *** DEVESTATES *** a sasquatch. (50) dmg (1567/2398hp)

or...

Your flaming bite *** DEVESTATES *** a sasquatch. (50) dmg ||| <- hp bars.

Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 11:59 am

You can use the #sub command.

#sub {(Your flaming bite ~*~*~* DEVESTATES ~*~*~* a sasquatch.)} {#sub %concat(%1," (50) dmg"}

Obviously you're going to want some code to change the number that's subbed, but that's the idea.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Thanks. I suppose I should make a separate thread with the database question?

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

As a sort of side question... the trigger I'm using to catch damage has this pattern:

{^Your (\w+ (?:\w+ ))(.*) a (.*)!$}

It's supposed to catch something like

Your (shocking bite) (*** DEVESTATES ***) a (critter).

or

Your (slash) (MANGLES) a (critter).

What I want to capture is in parenthesis.

Magician Joined: 23 Nov 2004 Posts: 364

Something you could do is set up a variable with your damage in increasing order with the relative dmg next to it in the string, so
#var dmglist hit|5|hit hard|10|very hard|20..... and so on.
Then you use could a trigger from that pattern of #if (%ismember(%2,@dmglist)) {#sub {%concat(%1,%item(@dmglist,%eval(%ismember(%2,@dmglist)+1))), dmg}}

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

I... Urm... Uh, the question is what again? Confused

THIS would be a good place to use your square brackets!!! [!.] Twisted Evil

This pattern should be what you are looking for.
You will need to follow this link to begin to understand it though...

http://unicode.org/reports/tr18/

You will want to go to the section titled. General Category Property

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

I guess a short explanation is in order.

\p{Ll} is any lowercase letter
\p{Lu} is any uppercase letter
\S is anything that is not a space or newline
[\p{Ll}\s]+ Means match at least one letter or space. It can match one to any amount of words and spaces spelled with lowercase letters. At least one!
[\p{Lu}\s]+ Same as above except Uppercase letters are used.
\b is what I use for word boundaries. I used it here to make sure we don't have any words that had both upper and lowercase letters.

If you didn't want to keep the asterisks you can just move the parenthesis in and use this pattern instead.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Some of the damage is lower caste

Your punch maims a critter.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

here's in damage types so you can get a feel of what I'm capturing and replacing.

[ Color ] [ Damage Amount ]

miss: 0

--- green ---
scratch: 1-4
graze: 5-8
hit: 9-12
injure: 13-16
wound: 17-20
maul: 21-24
decimate: 25-28
devastate: 29-32
maim: 33-36

--- YELLOW ---

MUTILATE: 37-40
DISEMBOWEL: 41-44
DISMEMBER: 45-48
MASSACRE: 49-52
MANGLE: 53-56

--- >>>BRIGHT RED<<< ---

*** DEMOLISH ***: 57-60
*** DEVASTATE ***: 61-75
=== OBLITERATE ===: 76-100
>>> ANNIHILATE <<<: 101-125
<<< ERADICATE >>>: 126-150

--- STRIPED ---

GHASTLY: 151-175
HORRID: 176-200
DREADFUL: 201-255
HIDEOUS: 226-250
INDESSCRIBABLE: 251-275
UNSPEAKABLE: 276+

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Damage Types:

"Acidic Bite" "Beating Bite"
"Blast" "Charge" "Chill"
"Chop" "Claw" "Cleave"
"Crush" "Divine" "Drain"
"Flame" "Flaming Bite" "Freezing Bite"
"Grep" "Magic" "None"
"Peck" "Pierce" "Pound"
"Punch" "Scratch" "Shocking Bite"
"Shock" "Slap" "Slash"
"Slice" "Slime" "Smash"
"Stab" "Sting" "Suction"
"Thrust" "Thwack" "Whip"
"Wrath"

and creatures, well creatures just vary. Some have a preceding a, other have a the, any players just have the player name with nothing preceding.

Ultimately, I'm trying to make my own damage calculator, but I also want to have options to have it show the damage I do if I want it, and maybe how much damage I've done thus far after each round, or how much the other creature has remaining, etc... and damage reports on the session, damage reports after a fight, etc... if I store fights in a database, I could even keep damage reports of a fight stored in a place. Would be sort of neat to also record the damage of other fights (watching Arena matches). I don't want someone to do it for me because I want to use it to learn and to know it so I can adjust it.

Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 4:40 pm

Good lord, that pattern is a million times more complex than it needs to be. The very unsightly \p{stuff} syntax can be much more pleasantly expressed with [a-z] and [A-Z]. The construct [\s\S] is a bit silly, too - since \S = [^\s], you've got a class there that'll match anything, same as . does. Your use of \b in this case is unecessary, too - the greedy star and plus before them will always end up catching a space before the word begins, which'll then create a word boundary. I'm not sure whether it'd speed up or slow down (or have no bearing on) match speed, because it's pretty mind-bending.

So yeah, that pattern has serious problems. Your original pattern, Chamenas, was too generic - the only non-variables in it were "Your", "a" and "!", which could feasibly match plenty of lines it shouldn't. Also, you used (?: ) when you didn't need to - since you're not doing anything to what's contained in the brackets (like some kind of +*? repetition), they're not needed. It should be trivial to make a list of all the possible damages and attacks:

#regex {^(Your (?:shocking bite|punch|chop|whatever) (?:misses|maims|scratches|whatever) a .+[!\.])$} {#sub %concat(%1," (50) dmg")}

which is a much better regex, because it's more specific. You could keep the attacks and stuff in variables if you like.

Wizard Joined: 22 Mar 2007 Posts: 2320

The problem I see is that you want to match 1 or 2 words for the attack type and 1 or 3 words for the damage degree, making it a bit tricky. The way I would do it is to make an explicit list of the things that I expect to match. That also eliminates accidental matching to completely unrelated lines. Something like this:

^Your (*) ({scratches|grazes|hits|injures|wounds|mauls|decimates|devastates|~*~*~* DEVASTATES ~*~*~*|=== OBLITERATES ===}) a (*).

Or:

^Your ({acidic bite|beating bite|blast|charge|chill|chop|claw|cleave|crush}) (*) a (*).

Or a combination.

For the damage levels, a database variable will work, but you'll have to come up keys that distinguish between "devastates" and "*** DEVASTATES ***". Chris-74269 suggested a string list, but you can't guarantee the order of that. A db variable like this would work:
#var dmglist scratch=1|graze=5|hit=9|injure=13 ...
The damage value would be e.g @dmglist.graze

edit: ah, ninja'd! (I finally figured out what that means)

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

There's just a lot of damage types and damage amounts, the list would be much longer than what you have as an example :/

Isn't ?: the symbol for optional? the damage type and damage amount are never optional, it's always one of them.

Also, the sub would have to be used within an expression, so...

#regex {^(Your (?:shocking bite|punch|chop|whatever) (?:misses|maims|scratches|whatever) (a|the| ) .+[!\.])$} {#IF (%2="*** DEVESTATES ***") {#sub %concat(%1, " (50) dmg")} }

with all the damage types as an option. I already did something similar and it didn't work, but debugging was nightmare because it was massive and ugly trying to use switch to compensate all the different damages.

Wizard Joined: 22 Mar 2007 Posts: 2320

Instead of an #if, use #switch. I don't see any option except that #if or #switch to test which damage level it is, regardless of what the trigger itself is. Unless you have a separate trigger for each damage level...

Wizard Joined: 22 Mar 2007 Posts: 2320

actually, I wouldn't have a #sub within each part of the #if or #switch structure. I would set a local variable to the number within the structure, and after that do a sub using the local variable.

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

Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 5:33 pm

What Rahab said. I think a switch looks much better than many triggers:

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

Basically the ? does not mean optional when it is immediately preceeded by an unescaped left paren (

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

I was demonstrating how to specifically pick upper and lower case letters. If you know of a better way to do it with a regex Fang feel free to show me.
The [a-z] and [A-Z] do NOT work.

Also, I was uncertain if the preceding and following *** were always the same number of characters or even if they WERE the same character.
The \S matches any non-white space but the way I had set it up using \b and a greedy uppercase-space match it would capture only what I intended.

And finally I was uncertain if the two sets of words were multiple or single words. If they are a single word they will NOT have padding spaces.

I was working under the assumption that the damage intensity words were always going to be capitalized and it turned out that they were not.

I knew that someone else would speak up once it was clear that he needed to use a string list match and Oh Look, they did. Laughing

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

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Yeah, I mentioned switches earlier. They just get ugly... also...

#switch (%2)
("*** DEVASTATES ***") {$dmg=50}
("maims") {$dmg=10}

wouldn't work for me when I used it before this thread, it seemed to want the ( ) to follow { } immediately, without a linebreak.

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

Sweet. Thanks JQuilici!

(?-i)[A-Z] Does indeed give only uppercase letters.
(?-i)[a-z] Also only matches lowercase letters.

Perhaps some of this stuff should be moved into a regex matching portion of the help?

Also does anyone mind testing this in Zmud?

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

Chamenas you just need to add a few spaces before the () {} on the following lines.

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

(?-i) works in ZMud as well

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

Here are two examples of how to use a Switch that are not terribly ugly.