Hi

That is a very useful thing to know about. It does strike me as very strange that the Oniguruma Regular Expressions system is like this.

I haven't as yet encountered a situation where this was going to be a problem but I'd noticed that it doesn't seem to be accounted for in Oniguruma.

In the system used by BBEedit¹ the matching expression is two or three characters long, where the last one or two characters or digits.

So, \1 matches the first group in the find expression and \01 does the same. If you want to replace this followed by the digit "2" then you put \012 in the replace expression. This is no problem up until 99 matches of course :)

¹Apologies for mentioning BBEdit :)

Patrick

http://www.patrickjames.co.uk

On 2 Sep 2008, at 16:53, Hans-Jörg Bibiko wrote:

Maybe you could try to use Conditional Insertions mentioned in the TM manual chapter 20.4.3 http://manual.macromates.com/en/regular_expressions

Naïve example:

I have the string

123456

and I want to get

123457

by using this regexp:

123(.)(.)7

this won't work:

123$1$27 because $27 isn't set

but this should work

123$1$2(?0:)7

(?0:) is a kind of dummy and inserts nothing

On 03.09.2008, at 12:25, Allan Odgaard wrote:

On 2 Sep 2008, at 21:40, Patrick James wrote:

...

That is a very useful thing to know about. It does strike me as very strange that the Oniguruma Regular Expressions system is like this.

For the records, the replacement format string is completely unrelated to Oniguruma.

Is there also a plan to support within the replacement format string Oniguruma's named groups and the entire back reference functionality (including back reference with nested levels)?

Cheers,

--Hans

On 03.09.2008, at 18:17, Allan Odgaard wrote:

On 3 Sep 2008, at 12:53, Hans-Jörg Bibiko wrote:

...

Is there also a plan to support within the replacement format string Oniguruma's named groups and the entire back reference functionality (including back reference with nested levels)?

The named captures will be available as $variables.

This will be awesome ;)

Not sure what the other thing you refer to is. Can you give an example?

OK. Maybe you remember Thomas Aylott and I fiddled around to implement a command which is able to select/find balanced HTML/XML tags. Finally we found a solution but it makes usage of many many lines of source code (the command should be in the TM trunk experimental).

Some while ago I read Oniguruma's RE.txt carefully. This kind of match is supported natively by Oniguruma. It is called 'back reference with nest level'.

Example 1:

I have a string: "<foo>f<foo>b<bar>123<bar>456</bar></bar>bb</foo>f</ foo>" and this regexp (please don't be frightened ;):

(?<element>\g<stag>\g<content>*\g<etag>){0}(?<stag><\g<name>\s*>){0}(? <name>[a-zA-Z_:]+){0}(?<content>[^<&]+(\g<element>|[^<&]+)*){0}(? <etag></\k<name+1>>){0}\g<element>

If I run this through Oniguruma I get these named groups: [syntax: group-name (which group): (string-indices[start-stop]]) content]

stag (2): (20-25) <bar> content (4): (5-49) f<foo>b<bar>123<bar>456</bar></bar>bb</foo>f element (1): (0-55) <foo>f<foo>b<bar>123<bar>456</bar></bar>bb</ foo>f</foo> etag (5): (49-55) </foo> name (3): (21-24) bar

Example 2: string: "o>b<bar>123<bar>456</bar></bar>bb</foo>f</foo>"

stag (2): (11-16) <bar> content (4): (8-25) 123<bar>456</bar> element (1): (3-31) <bar>123<bar>456</bar></bar> etag (5): (25-31) </bar> name (3): (12-15) <bar>

In other words it should be possible to use Oniguruma's power to find/ select the next balanced HTML/XML tag by using only one more or less easy regular expression depending of the position of the caret.

As far as I know Ruby 1.9 is supporting this (?). By myself I'm using a C program linked to the onig lib to match these nested stuff.

Furthermore this issue leads to a question: Would it be possible to use TM's Oniguruma engine from outside, meaning an API?

Best,

--Hans

On Sep 4, 2008, at 3:30 AM, Hans-Jörg Bibiko wrote:

Stop. I've just tried out the regexp with TM and IT ALREADY WORKS ;-O

OK. You have my attention. Does this mean we'll be able to get the holy grail of full html balanced tag selection with just a regular expression?

—Thomas Aylott / subtleGradient

On 3 Sep 2008, at 22:04, Hans-Jörg Bibiko wrote:

[...] Furthermore this issue leads to a question: Would it be possible to use TM's Oniguruma engine from outside, meaning an API?

API accessible from where? I.e. ‘outside’ would likely be another programming language, and then you probably already have a regexp library for that language.