AutoHotkey Community

[John B.]

Hi,

I posted a question over in Ask for Help, but it's led me to make a suggestion as well. The problem I encountered is that the Filepattern in a file loop can match a string anywhere in the file name. Thus:

[Tuncay]

This would break existing scripts and also slow down if regex is not needed.

[engunneer]

perhaps we could add then SetLoopMatchMode as in SetTitleMatchMode, which has a regex option.

This would make a powerful grep-like tool.
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(Common Answers)

[polyethene]

I like engineers idea, an regexmatch equality operator would be fantastic! Something similar to perl, e.g. if ("abcdef" ~= "\w{1,10}") == true
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[Tuncay]

A regex match operator??? Wow, sounds very good idea to me, I would find it also very useful.
If (var ~= var2)
I like that syntax.

Back again to topic, the SetLoopMatchMode option seems to be a simple solution to me. But, is this really needfull? First, we should answer this question.

[engunneer]

It would be extremely powerful

The equivalent would be to

[Tuncay]

We often need regex. Instead to create new operator or special coded support of regex at some functions, I wish we could specifiy every (expression-) string or variable as a regex. That is more natural and usable in more situations. In example with a special symbol or character (example the ~ symbol) AutoHotkey knows the next string is a regex. This allows us in general to write faster regex. Of course we cannot use in that case all features, i.e. the parameters. But it could lead also to faster code, because there is less to parse. And ErrorLevel could be automatically set to last match.

[majkinetor]

++

RegEx everywhere FTW.
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[HotKeyIt]

As far as I understand this is not possible because it is not supported by FindFirstFile Function

[[VxE]]

^ That's hardly an obstacle; as Engunneer pointed out, a "Loop, FilePatternRegex" could check each filepath against the needle. Such a loop might instead create a list of files, filter them with the needle, and loop through the filtered list.

As far as syntax goes, I think something along the lines of Loop, FileRegex, NeedleRegex, [include folders, recurse] would make more sense than a SetLoopMatchMode, ... and it would be consistent with the syntax for other special loops.
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[HotKeyIt]

[[VxE]]

Heh, if there were no way to specify a 'starting folder' for the loop, then, yes, that would be an accurate illustration.

Anyways, I'm not convinced that there is an elegant, intuitive solution for combining a file loop with regex, however, what good is it to say it's impossible ?

For the time being, using something like