Regular Expression search in Maps

[TiTou]

I love the new data type "Maps", I just wish there was one more primitive in the Maps palette to be able to retrieve elements using a regular expression search.

That would rock!

[AristosQueue (NI)]

You don't need a primitive for that. Write a malleable VI to iterate over the keys (wire map to border of For Loop) and filter on those keys that are accepted by the input regular expression. We intend to build primitives into the language only for those operations where we can generate assembly code that cannot be expressed efficiently in G. I would expect that in this case (and all filtering operation cases) that the G implementation would be as performant as anything R&D could generate in the compiler.

We will be keeping our eyes open for common operations that many people write and adding those to the palettes over time. It would not surprise me if some sort of parameterizable filtering VIM made it into that list (similar to the sort VIMs that you can find in vi.lib\Array).

[TiTou]

Fair enough, then let me modify my suggestion and replace "primitive" with "malleable VI".

Indeed, just like the filtering VIM of the array palette.

[BertMcMahan]

I gave this idea a kudo because I needed to to it today and found you you can't use Match Regular Expression in a vim (or inlined function). The only mention of this happening is that thread- I can't believe no one else has needed a Regex inside a Malleable VI. One workaround would be to use "Search and Replace String" with the "Regular Expressions" flag set. Another would be to create a wrapper around Match Regular Expression.

[wiebe@CARYA]

> I can't believe no one else has needed a Regex inside a Malleable VI.

Of course someone else needed this...It's just a lot of work to bring this up in a constructive way, compared to using a workaround.

[BertMcMahan]

Hah, you're of course correct. I meant to say, "I can't believe no one else has needed this, found they can't do it, then gone online to complain" 😁