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Regular Expressions Posted by enquirer (enquirer), 20 February 2004 Does Tcl support regular expressions?Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 20 February 2004 Yes - if you're familiar with regular expressions in other languages, all versions of Tcl support the basics. Versions 8.3 and later support more advanced regular expressions too, based on the POSIX rather than the Perl extensions.Would you like a further explanation? A regular expression is a pattern against which you can match a character string - you don't say "is the string exactly xxxx" but rather "does this string look like yyyyyy" where yyyyyy is a description written in a special format. At its most straightforward, a regular expression match command return either a true ("yes, I matched") or false ("no, I didn't match") result. It can be extended to return pieces of the incoming string that matched the particular pattern, and also to substitute matching parts of the incoming string with a replacement string. Here's an example of a regular expression match in Tcl - this particular piece of code is a quick test to see if a line of test typed in by the user looks like an email address or not: Code:
Regular expressions comprise about 6 different element types Literals - characters that match exactly such as @ in the example Character Classes - where any one character from a number of possibilities is matched. In the example [^ ] matches any character except a space Counts - which specify that the previous element occurs a number of times. We've used + to say "1 or more" in the example Grouping - round brackets around part of a regular expression to indicate that this part is an 'interesting bit' to be saved out to a variable on successful match. Groupings also effect counts and alternation (later!) Assertions - You can start a regular expression with a ^ to indicate it must match at the start of the string, and/or end it with $ to indicate that the match must be at the end. We have not used this in our example Alternation - a | character can be used to indicate "or" - for example "rabbit|banana" will match rabbit or banana. This page is a thread posted to the opentalk forum
at www.opentalk.org.uk and
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follow this link.
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