BreakPoint
Regular Expressions Board
@smercurio_fc wrote:
But then regular expressions are pure gibberish to me anyway, so it's not that big a of surprise. I get a headache every time I look at them or have to use them.
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems."
I just found out the hard way (scratching my head in a 15min debugging session) that character class negation is different between the Match Pattern Function and the Match Regular Expression Function.
Here's an example from the Help Docs:
Match Pattern Function:
One or more characters other than digits [~0-9]+
Match Regular Expression Function:
One or more characters other than digits [^0-9]+
Character class negation is the tilde for Match Pattern, and the caret for Match Regular Expression (and the rest of humanity).
If anyone can offer a history lesson on the legacy of tilde usage (calling all Darins 
) feel free to hop in 
Here is a basic regEx which can be used to extract command and value from a string.
It has to work on the fact that the script is written by different people and the syntax may / will have variations.
For instance value / seperator / command,
where the seperator can be a white space or a comma: , or \s or \t or ,\s or ,\t
or in a wose case scenario: ,\s\t
There are other ways of doing this, but can quickly become messy...
I wrote a Rube Goldberg expression.
It could have been simplified to :
[0-9]+[, \t \s]+
And the expression can be extended to include the command:
in the format : command \ delimiter \ value \ delimiter \ operation
