AutoHotkey Community

[kalled]

Actually I don't like being a "Me too" poster, but since using PERL I could not think about programming without RegExps, so maybe a poll or something like that might tell how many think like me.
Or is an implementation already on its way?

Thanks a lot for Your good work!

Kalle

[Chris]

Regular expressions are planned. One problem with them is that most open source implementations seem to be quite large, and thus might increase the size of compiled scripts by too much.

I was considering recently whether simple wildcards would be a good first step toward RegEx. For example, the wildcards * and ? seem to cover about 80% of the benefit of RegEx (in terms of common usage). If those wildcards could be implemented as a TitleMatchMode and for string searching such as IfInString/StringGetPos, it might satisfy a lot of users, even those who don't know (and perhaps don't want to learn) regular expressions.

As someone familiar with RegEx, perhaps you can list the top five or so RegEx features that you use (in addition to . and .*, which are roughly equivalent to ? and * in the file system, as well as apps such as MS Excel).

Anyone else who is a heavy user of RegEx, please feel free to do the same. This discussion may help limit the scope of RegEx implementation, and thus allow me to get it done sooner.

Thanks.

[Atomhrt]

So, would your proposed * wildcard method allow us to match these two files:

filename-01252005.txt
filename-2-01252005.txt

If I used a wildcard string such as: filename*01*.txt or f*01*2005*.txt ?
_________________
I am he of whom he speaks!

[Chris]

Yes, I think those examples would both work. It seems best to have * stand for any string of 0 or more characters, and ? stand for exactly one character.

[Atomhrt]

[savage]

In that case you should also do range wildcards, like [A-Z] or [a,b,c,d] or the like. That's the last major component of basic shell wildcards.

[BoBo]

[Aa-Zz,0-9] or [a,b,e-i]

[Chris]

Thanks. That would keep the scope pretty narrow, while hopefully supporting the majority of RegEx needs.