Joel Neely wrote:
>Carl Read wrote:
>
>>Well, you didn't say it was for any old phone numbers in any
>>old text, did you?
>>
>
>No, but I did say "memo"; I suspect most of us would consider
>
> Albert Jones-Smythe ... on 12-01-2001 ... of 28-Nov-2001
>
>as neither unusual text nor phone numbers. ;-)
>
>>Will your Perl script get this right for instance...
>>So these are standard NZ phone numbers...
>>
>> National: 1-2-345 6789
>> Local: 345 6789
>> 0800: 0800 123 456
>>
>
>No, it wouldn't. I should have noted my deliberate decision to
>handle only a common form of US phone numbers (but the regular
>expression was certainly clear on that point ;-).
>
>Of course, the big danger of trying to write code that handles
>arbitrary human-written/readable text is that humans can use their
>context-sensitive intelligence to interpret (and even correct)
>a wide range of syntactical variation. The only way around that
>AFAIK is to impose limits on the amount of variation before the
>program either gives up or raises the case for discussion. For
>example, the simplest substitution rule that covers all of your
>NZ samples, as well as common variations on US phone numbers
>would be
>
> s/\b[- .()\d]{8,}\b/####/g
>
>which would replace *any* run (of at least 8 characters) of digits,
>hyphens, spaces, dots, and parentheses with the "blot-out" string.
>
>But, of course, that also would affect strings such as
>
> 31-12-2001
>
>and
>
> 3.1415926535
>
>which a human would likely *not* interpret as phone numbers.
>
>IIRC, there was a thread a few months ago about trying to come
>up with a PARSE rule which would recognize phone numbers from
>as many countries as possible with as few errors (false positives
>and false negatives) as possible. As I recall, the result was
>that the range of variation as one added countries with differing
>conventions rapidly made the task infeasible.
>
>>rebol[]c: charset "0123456789" parse/all f: read %memo.txt[some
>>[a: 1 2[3 c "-"]4 c b:(change/part a "####" b) | skip]]print f
>>
>
>Very nice! I find it hard to imagine a shorter solution in REBOL.
>
eh, I can't read it right now - what does 1 2 [3 c "-"] 4 c is doing?
:-) Thanks ... I also found out there is some strange 'opt keyword in
parse rules :-)
>
>
>>I couldn't have done it without Petr's example though, as what
>>I was trying wasn't working. (: But I now know a lot more about
>>parsing than I did yesterday...
>>
>
>And *THAT*, to my way of thinking, is the a real payoff to such
>parlor games as this -- we improve our grasp of what is (or isn't)
>feasible with one tool or another, and learn to use our tool(s)
>better.
>
Yes! That's exactly it. Language flame wars could be seen so often, that
I am no longer interested in them :-) On the other hand I have no time
to stufy other languages. Sometimes though I call my friend knowing php
e.g. and ask him, how would he solve it in the tool he uses. Then I try
to think about it and map to what I know about Rebol, and try to find
adequate solution ...
-pekr-
>
>
>-jn-
>
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