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Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

So, this is in relation to that thirst trigger...

When my character goes to sleep, I have it look for this pattern:

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 12:23 am

You have to indicate the desire to capture the data in the trigger by surrounding it with parentheses. So:

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Alright, so the ( ) mean you want to store it, I thought it was the other way around. Thanks.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Also, I need to differentiate between a and the

so

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

if you want to use a stringlist pattern, the correct braces are {}. [] is used for the range pattern, which is any combination of the contained characters

[a|the] -- will match on any combination of a, |, t, h, and e.
{a|the} -- will only match on the word "a" or the word "the".

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5187

Try enter this into the command line and deleting any other triggers you have that are related to this.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5187

Oops I was missing a closing parenthesis there.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Alright. Thanks, at the very least I can learn from it. :)

Adept Joined: 21 Sep 2005 Posts: 250 Location: Austin, TX

Or even

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Alright, so this works because...

hmmm .* makes sense to me,

(\w+)|) does not make sense to me

nor does ?:

It did work though.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

If you didn't have the ?: then it would store ' .* (\w+)|' as %1. Using ?: before means don't remember this bit for purposes of a %1 match.
The (\w+)| bit is saying either match a word or match nothing. You could also replace the | with ?, which means match 1 or 0 occurences of the pattern and might be a more standard way of doing it.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

?: Don't remember what bit? if the .*(/w+) is storing a word, but ignoring none words (in case none exist) then what am I not remembering? the "in a|the" ? How does it differentiate, or is that what the : does?

Either way, I can't test anything yet. I can't get my CMUD functional...

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 11:55 am

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Isn't that what I have?

Adept Joined: 21 Sep 2005 Posts: 250 Location: Austin, TX

I wonder why I didn't do it Fang's way? Perhaps it was late...whatever. I guess there's more than one way to skin a cat, even in regexes. Smile

And to answer chamenas' earlier question, the pattern (?:regex) works just like (regex) in that it groups things in the pattern, however, it doesn't create a backreference. IOW, it doesn't 'remember' anything into %1...as far as the numbered patterns go, that set of parens doesn't exist. If that part of the pattern were '( .* (\w+))?' or '( .* (\w+)|)', you'd have to assign bed = %2, because %1 would have everything after the word sleep, and not just the last word.

So, to break it down further, my original version had '(?:regex1|regex2), which is an alternation - it matches either regex1 or regex2, and doesn't bother putting the results of that match into a numbered backreference. In this example, regex1 was ' .* (\w+)', which matches a bunch of words, like 'in a comfy bed', and catches just the last one into %1. Regex2 was completely blank, so it matches a zero-length string (and thus made the whole thing match 'You go to sleep.').

You can find out about all sorts of wonderful regex syntax here, and it even has a good tutorial. CMUD uses the PCRE library, and Vijilante has updated it to the latest version in CMUD 2.20.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Yeah, I was already given the link. But I think reading it, trying and asking questions here is the best way to learn.

So ?: says, "don't remeber" \w means "grab last word"?

Adept Joined: 21 Sep 2005 Posts: 250 Location: Austin, TX

No...\w means 'a word character'. It's equivalent to [a-zA-Z0-9_], typically. So, (\w+) means, 'a series of one-or-more word characters (and stick it in a backreference)'. Since that part of the pattern is bounded by a space (before) and a literal . (after), it should match the final word in the sentence.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

(?: .* (\w+)?)\.$

so ?: means: don't remember this

.* since it's in parentheses means: put this in %1

But I don't get how it isolates the last character,

(\w+) is what forces it to store a word then?

and ?) I assume means: don't remember stuff after this.

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 1:06 pm

As I said in my post, that last question mark is in the wrong place. It needs to be after the last bracket, not before it.

Brackets () normally mean "capture this". Brackets (?: ) mean "don't capture this". The reason we use the brackets that aren't captured is because modifiers like +, ? and * apply to whatever came before them - if what came before them is brackets, the modifier applies to the brackets as a whole. Sometimes we want to use that without capturing anything.

So. The (?: ) brackets (the closing bracket is the final one, the one before the ?\.$ ) mean "don't capture these brackets". The .* means "any number of any character". The next set of brackets mean "capture this". What's being captured is \w+ - which is a word character, a letter or a number. The plus means "one or more of what came before", so "one or more word characters". Then you have the two closing brackets. The ? means "0 or 1 of what came before" - the (?: ) brackets came before it, so it makes everything inside those brackets optional. Then you have a . (escaped so that it doesn't mean "any character") and $, which means the end of the line.

Seriously, check out the regex website we keep linking.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Every bracket on the tutorial site is a ( ) in CMUD?

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 1:14 pm

Not sure what you're asking. Regexes in CMUD work exactly the same as regexes on that site.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Every time I use a bracket, someone says I should use parentheses.

Say I want to say it could be a or the, on the site I'm fairly certain it says [a|the]

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 1:33 pm

Parenthesis and brackets are the same thing. Brackets or parenthesis (), square brackets [], triangular brackets <>, braces or curly brackets {}

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547