On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 9:30 PM, Graham Samuel <livf...@mac.com> wrote:
> Of course there is no shortage of other texts on regex to be found on > Google, but can anyone suggest a concise primer that will help me parse > ascii strings without too many tears? If there is one, maybe it's time to > suggest that RunRev mention it in the documentation. > > Graham, unfortunately you don't mention which platform you're on, but for those suffering similar, using OS X 10.4 or higher, may I suggest the free RegExhibit: http://homepage.mac.com/roger_jolly/software/index.html Call up the Help Menu -> RegExhibit Help and check out "Regular expression overview", it's in a seperate window so you can work with RegExhibit at the same time as you read the Overview. Basically RegExhibit has two fields, you copy and paste into the bottom field a sample of text you'd be working with. In the top field you build your grep, as you build it characters in the lower field start becoming colourised, you just keep building your grep until you get a perfect match :-) Note there are different colours for match vs capturing [using ()]. I use grep very infrequently and find RegExhibit a massive time saver. I use to have a multi-platform Java app that basically did the same, but trashed it once I found the faster RegExhibit; so if you are on Win, I'm sure you can find similar out there. Don't forget that within Rev there is the Rinaldi plugin RegExBuilder - Development -> Plugins. It's basically the same as RegExhibit except no Overview. It's perfect for double checking your grep behaves in Rev as it's suppose to without having to write any scripts. Finally, for Mac users again and those with pre 10.4 machines, the free, and every Mac user should have, text editor TextWrangler from BareBones: http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.html also has an excellent rundown on using grep. Go to the Help menu -> TextWrangler Help, go to the Grep Reference hyperlink. Again you can enter sample text into the main document window and then enter your grep into the find window. It's not live like RegExhibit, you have to keep hitting the Search button to see your results, so it's not as fast. HTH _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
