[Newbies] Re: [on] how to match partial regexes? how to match and
delete string prefixes?
Zulq Alam
me at zulq.net
Mon Mar 30 04:18:32 UTC 2009
Hi Oscar,
Oscar Nierstrasz wrote:
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> Is there a way ask a regex if it matches any part of a string? matches:
> wants an exact match, and matchesPrefix: clearly only matches a prefix.
> The best I found was to abuse matchesIn: and check the size of the
> response, but this is not very clean.
Have a look at #search: as I think this will help you.
> ---
>
> A second question: I would like to strip a string prefix if it matches.
> Since this is a literal string, I should not need regexes. But I cannot
> find a nice existing method to do this. With regexes I must escape all
> special regex chars:
I can't think of anything off the top of my head but the great thing
about smalltalk is you can easily add what you need. For example, you
could use #beginsWith: when adding a method to String.
copyReplacePrefix: prefix with: replacement
self beginsWith: prefix
ifTrue: [^ replacement , (self copyFrom: prefix size to: self size)]
^ self
Then you will be able to do:
'abracadabra' copyReplacePrefix: 'abra' with: ''
Next step would be to write a few unit tests and then attach both as to
an enhancement request at http://bugs.squeak.org.
>
> aliasesAsRegexes
> aliasesAsRegexes ifNil: [
> aliasesAsRegexes := aliases collect: [:alias |
> alias := '\/' asRegex copy: alias replacingMatchesWith: '\/'.
> alias := '\~' asRegex copy: alias replacingMatchesWith: '\~'.
> alias := '\:' asRegex copy: alias replacingMatchesWith: '\:'.
> alias := '\.' asRegex copy: alias replacingMatchesWith: '\.'.
> alias asRegex
> ]].
> ^ aliasesAsRegexes
>
I don't think /, ~ or : have any special meaning so why do you need to
escape them? Even if you did, a better way might be to do:
alias
copyWithRegex: '[/~:.]'
matchesTranslatedUsing: [:ea | '\' , ea]
But if you're just replacing '.' then you can use:
alias copyReplaceAll: '.' with: '\.'
Hope this helps.
Zulq
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