I ran into my situation with my setguild script where I needed some basic wildcard's for filtering error chat.

For example, "You must way %d seconds to use that command again!" would have bee useful. I ended up just matching the beginning and the end of the chat anyways, however.

I'd like something like that for getstringkeys().

Yeah's the kind of things I wanted to be able to do.

Hmmm It could be interesting to add support for pcre. You basicly just want one command with a string and a regular expression as parameters and you get back a string?

I'm not sure how it's usually used, but I would assume a function would also be needed to check a string against a regular expression. For example, ensuring that a string is only alphanumeric.

I imagine people would want both a

string.match(pattern) -> boolean

and a

string.replace(pattern, replacement_string) -> string

Where the replacement_string could include back-references (like $1 or $2) if pattern includes capturing parenthesis.


I still think this is a bad idea though.

Yeah, match and replace would be nice. And I still think that the fact that not everyone could use it is not a valid reason for not having it, that's just silly.

This should be implemented ASAP. I can think of a lot of situations where a replace command would be great.

Matching should return or make accessible the part of the string that was actually matched (probably just offset, length) and all the parenthesised groups.

Replacing should optionally take a function instead of a string that is called with the matched part and groups and returns a replacement string.

^^

I like the way you are thinking. I wouldn't mind having something that works just as Lua's string.gsub() does.

If you do it exactly like WhiteDragon said I will love you forever and ever.

Three month bump.

I'm finding myself wanting this more and more :(
Even Javascript has support built into the language (it's literally in the syntax) for Regular Expressions, come on now.

Bump.

Do it.

Bumping because I'd really like this ^^