* Robin Anson writes: > On Tue 30 March 2004, 2:54:02 +1000, Marck D Pearlstone wrote:
> MDP>>> %IF:"%ABtoGender"="0":"Spett.le":"Egr." %- > MDP>>> %SETPATTREGEXP="(.*)( - .*)?"%- > MDP>>> %REGEXPBLINDMATCH="%ABTOLASTNAME='%TOLNAME'"%- > MDP>>> %SUBPATT(1) > JO>> Don't Know why the brackets in ( - .*)? are useless, but it's running > JO>> well. >> They are important if you have any records without either "- work" >> or "- home" at the end. Then the expression will fail to match >> completely and result in a blank name. My version is the one to use. > When I tried this on an entry with "smith - home" as the last name, the > first expression matched the entire last name and left a zero occurrence > of the second expression. I thought the way around this was to set the > first expression in the regex to be "(.*?)" (I think the term is > non-greedy), but that simply failed to match anything then. > Can anyone explain why that might be the case? It's because the pattern doesn't need to match the whole subject. This regexp should work: "^(.*?)(?: - .*)?$" --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- %_testa="smith - work" %_testb="smith" %_testa %_testb ---- %setpattregexp="^(.*?)(?: - .*)?$"%- 1. a) %regexpmatch="%_testa" b) %regexpmatch="%_testb" --- %setpattregexp="(.*?)(?: - .*)?"%- 2. a) %regexpmatch="%_testa" b) %regexpmatch="%_testb" --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Carsten -- ________________________________________________ Current version is 2.04.7 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
