Regular expression escape characters

[dunbarx at aol.com]

I am not sure if this if feasible, but could you replace the problem char with another, one that does not appear in the original text and has no agenda with regex? When you find the chunk data for the substitutes, you can retranslate that back to the original.


So if it is true that "!" is a control char for regex, replace it with, say, numToChar 186, or whatever, do your find on that char, and you will have the correct find info for the original char.


Craig Newman



-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Vlahos <bvlahos at mac.com>
To: How to use LiveCode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>
Sent: Wed, Mar 28, 2012 11:22 pm
Subject: Regular expression escape characters


I am building a regular expression to find a set of question marks and 
exclamation points. For example ??? or !!!.

These are special characters so they mean something to a regular expression.

How do I find them in the text?

If I want to find a word such as "Bill" I can matchText with (\bBill\b) but I 
can't do (\b!!!\b) and if I do (\b???\b) I get an error.

I've looked on the web for escaping characters and they suggest using a slash 
before. However, when I try (\b\!\!\!\b) it doesn't work.

I've also found references to \Q…\E to have everything between a literal but 
(\b\Q!!!\E\b) doesn't work either.

Any ideas?

Bill Vlahos
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