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String.match / String.find

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Posted by

Scripts (2 posts) Bio

Date

Sun 23 Sep 2007 12:20 AM (UTC)

Amended on Sun 23 Sep 2007 03:37 AM (UTC) by Scripts

Message

is there any way to dump the result of this directly into an array or a table?

i.e.

array={}
SomeTableElement={
"^(.+) searching for 2 (.+) matches here%.",
"^only searching for 1 (+.) here%."
}

for i=1,2 do
array = string.match(aString, SomeTableElement[i])
--do something with array here
end

I am trying to make a flexible string search that bases itself on valus in a table, but I can't seem to create a universal way to store all the data coming out of the string.match() function.

I'm extremely new to LUA and any help is greatly appreciated.

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Posted by Nick Gammon Australia (23,173 posts) Bio Forum Administrator

Date Reply #1 on Sun 23 Sep 2007 04:56 AM (UTC)

Message

Yes you can, but I wonder what you are really trying to do here.

Since string.match can return multiple results, and you want to store them somewhere, you can make a table on-the-fly like this:


for i=1,2 do
  array = { string.match(aString, SomeTableElement[i]) }
  --do something with array here
end

Note the { ... } here which puts the string.match results into a table, which is then stored in "array".

The first thing I would do is change it from using "for i=1,2 do" to using ipairs, because I assume you will gradually add more items to the table, and don't want to have to keep remembering to change the 2 to 3, and then 4 and so on. This code will do the same thing, for any size table:


for k, v in ipairs (SomeTableElement) do
  array = { string.match(aString, v) }
  --do something with array here
end

I use the variables k and v to represent the Key and Value for the table. The key will simply be 1, 2, 3 ... and so on, and the value is the table item value for each key.

The other thing I worry about here is that you are applying the search to the same string, regardless of whether or not you get a match.

If the matches are mutually exclusive you might want to break out of the loop as soon as a match is made.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

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Posted by

Scripts (2 posts) Bio

Date

Reply #2 on Sun 23 Sep 2007 03:44 PM (UTC)

Amended on Sun 23 Sep 2007 03:48 PM (UTC) by Scripts

Message

Ahh, that's how you do it.

In my current code I do use ipairs(), and I have a test case for matching strings...just couldn't figure out how to put the data into a table. Eventually I want to use a lookup table to re-order the string.match() results for each case individually, but this gets me rolling again.

Thanks Nick, you're the man :)

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