AutoHotkey Community

[savage]

I think AHK could use some regular expression support. I mean, we've already got a good set of functions for text and file manipulation, but I think the big one could be really useful. I, for one, make pretty frequent use of regex in all sorts tasks. Since I've started using ahk for most of my little day to day connudrums in windows, having this available would be areal boon. Maybe it could just be implemented as a function, like so:

Regex, outputvariable, options, input
options = find (returns the matches) or replace (returns modified text)

Of course for the most usage it would need to be added to if statements, which might be a more dicey proposition.

[Chris]

It's a good suggestion. I'm adding your examples to the item already on the to-do list: "StringGetPos: Support optional regular expressions." I've also raised its priority slightly.

[savage]

It might even be easy to implement. Maybe you should check out the Perl Compatible Regular Expression Library.

[Chris]

Thanks, that should help.

[Tekl]

Hi,

Regexps would be really nice!

Tekl

[Stefan]

> I think AHK could use some regular expression support.

I wanna second this request
_________________
Stefan

This post was created with the kindly help of http://dict.leo.org/ and remember: “Allways look on the bright side of Life”

[Chris]

Thanks, I have raised the priority.

[Atomhrt]

A couple of more libs that you might want to look into are:
http://www.boost.org/libs/regex/doc/index.html
http://research.microsoft.com/projects/greta/

I've used the boost lib and it is quite good.
_________________
I am he of whom he speaks!

[Chris]

Thanks.

[patord]

New to autohotkey, and the only major issue I am hurting for is regular expression support. I see that it has been bumped higher in priority. A search for "regular and expression" does not show any current/recent status in the forums.

I'd like to add my request for regex support and that it be a high priority for your next release. At this moment, there's a lot of things I want to do but will take too much coding without regexp. I'm absolutely spoiled with regexp support in perl, tcl, and php.

Having regexp support almost removes the need for things like:
SetTitleMatchMode 1|2|3


Someone above posted a few url links for source code. Here's one my company uses... It's a traditional NFA regex engine, is the basis for alot of the ones listed above.

http://arglist.com/regex/

Its license is basically public domain.

TIA

[Chris]

[BoBo]

Noob question: would it be possible to use a separate AHK regex component/module which could be linked/connected/called from within a script. This way it would be up to the user to include it or not, and the original installer could/would be kept small.

Complete nonsense ???

[hh]

bobo's idea might work.

chris: whay are you so concerned about increasing the size by 20 or 40K?
these days you can hardly buy computers that have small hard drives. it seems that for the vast majority of systems hard drive space is not really a big concern.

also, exe files usually compress well.

how do others feel about this? i really don't care whether or not the executable size increases or decreases by 50KB or 100KB...

[Simpleton]

size is always importatant and if there are many copies if AHK running it might use up a lot of memory. Personally I think that regex is worth it (Perl's is my personaly fav btw). I like the optional linking thing, perhaps AHK could setup some sort of dll plugin system where the plugins have to be included.

feels like a lot of work though, meh, maybe I'll look into it, ahk is open source right?

[Chris]