On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 10:16:54PM -0800, Jeremy Drake wrote: > On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, David Fetter wrote: > > > On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 05:11:30PM -0800, Jeremy Drake wrote: > > > Anyway, the particular thing I was writing was a function like > > > substring(str FROM pattern) which instead of returning just the > > > first match group, would return an array of text containing all > > > of the match groups. > > If you are subscribed to -patches, I sent my code to date there > earlier this evening. I also said that I wanted to make a function > that split on a pattern (like perl split) and returned setof text. > > > That'd be great! People who use dynamic languages like Perl would > > feel much more at home having access to all the matches. While > > you're at it, could you could make pre-match and post-match > > (optionally--I know it's expensive) available? > > I could, but I'm not sure how someone would go about accessing such > a thing. What I just wrote would be most like this perl: @foo = > ($str=~/pattern/);
> Where would pre and post match fit into this? Are you talking about a > different function? Yes, although it might have the same name, as in regex_match(pattern TEXT, string TEXT, return_pre_and_post BOOL). > Or sticking prematch at the beginning of the array and postmatch at > the end? I could also put the whole match somewhere also, but I did > not in this version. The data structure could be something like TYPE matches ( prematch TEXT, match TEXT[], postmatch TEXT ) > The code I wrote returns a text[] which is one-dimensional, has a lower > bound of 1 (as most postgres arrays do), where if there are n capture > groups, ra[1] has the first capture group and ra[n] has the last one. > Since postgres has an option to make different lower bounds, I suppose I > could have an option to put the prematch in [-1], the entire match in [0], > and the postmatch in [n+1]. This seems to be odd to me though. Odd == bad. I think the pre- and post-matches should be different in essence, not just in index :) > I guess I'm saying, I agree that the entire match, prematch, and postmatch > would be helpful, but how would you propose to present these to the user? See above :) Cheers, D -- David Fetter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://fetter.org/ phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Skype: davidfetter Remember to vote! ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings