On 04 Oct 2015, at 12:46 PM, Rainer Jung <rainer.j...@kippdata.de> wrote:
>> But it must not be too complicated. We don't want an unreadable mess
>> like the sh/bash string manipulation functions.
+1.
> Yes, I agree. When starting to think closer, I noticed that the string mode
> currently only supports a syntax that is pretty different from the boolean
> mode and is much more limited. In that mode everything is a string except it
> is marked via %{XXX}, in which case XXX is a variable name, except XXX is
> AAA:BBB in which case it is AAA("BBB").
>
> So AFAIK we don't support functions with more than one argument in string
> mode and my naive idea of using "STRING =~ s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/FLAGS" runs
> into the problem, that we currently don't support operators like "=~" etc. in
> string mode.
>
> So I wonder whether it would be useful to allow for a more general mode which
> would depending on operators or functions handle the argument and result as
> strings or booleans using auto conversion between them where needed. Of
> course in that mode verbatim strings would need proper quoting (unlike pure
> string mode in which everything by default is a verbatim string). We could
> then even support
>
> BOOLEXPR ? STRINGEXPR1 : STRINGEXPR 2
>
> For compatibility that generalized mode would probably need a mode
> differentiator syntax for compatibility reasons in 2.4 but could be the
> default mode in trunk. Something like your "%!" prefix.
How about a regex function?
The single argument could be “s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/FLAGS”.
Regards,
Graham
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