[Solved] RegExMatch ErrorLevel seems inconsistent with documentation Topic is solved

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EDIT: my bad. As @Ragnar points out below, I was catching the error incorrectly.

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According to RegExMatch docs, the function can

throw an exception on failure (not to be confused with "no match found")

with ErrorLevel set like so:

Case 1: 0, which means that no error occurred.
Case 2: A string in the following form: Compile error N at offset M: description. In that string, N is the PCRE error number, M is the position of the offending character inside the regular expression, and description is the text describing the error.
Case 3: A negative number, (...)

The code below is designed to produce a compile error of the second type because the regex pattern is incomplete, and should cause the function to set ErrorLevel to an error string. However, ErrorLevel is set to "0", which is incorrect both according to the docs and to PCRE internals.

Code: Select all

	Try {
		match_position := RegexMatch("blah", "(?:incomplete[")
	}
	Catch e {
		MsgBox % ErrorLevel
	}

I verified that PCRE itself in fact returns an error string, not zero, by running the pcretest utility that ships with PCRE. Testing that regex on subject "abc", PCRE fails with this message:

Failed: missing terminating ] for character class at offset 14

Which confirms that the pattern cannot compile, being incomplete.

Haven't checked the AHK code but I'm assuming there's a test slightly off in there. Thought I'd report. Thanks in advance for taking a look.

[Ragnar]

ErrorLevel is not intended to be used like this.

The correct way with ErrorLevel:

Code: Select all

match_position := RegexMatch("blah", "(?:incomplete[")
if ErrorLevel
	MsgBox % ErrorLevel

The correct way with try-catch:

Code: Select all

try
	match_position := RegexMatch("blah", "(?:incomplete[")
catch e
	MsgBox % e.message

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@Ragnar
You are completely right!
Thank you so much. My bad.