Hello all,
I've played a bit with the regular expressions in TB, and... well,
if someone is interested, here's just an interesting task:
Assume you want to get rid of those funny
"XYZ>" quotation marks (I really dislike these:-)). Well, if you
don't want to get rid of these, it doesn't really matter:-). At first I
thought it would be quite a simple task to do so using
%REGEXPTEXT and %REGEXPQUOTES macros, but... Well,
first things first: let's consider the simpliest possible case, the
message looking like:
some text...
some text...
XYZ> some text...
XYZ> some text...
XYZ> some text...
So here we are, the task would be to construct the Reply
Template that would automatically get rid of "ZYZ>" things,
replacing them with just ">" or whatever. In Perl, this task is not
a task at all, for example, assuming that I have the message text
in the variable $kisa, I would write something like:
@words=$kisa =~/(?-sm)>.*\n/g;
print "@words\n";
or maybe I would have made the output operator look
somewhat different; anyhow, it doesn't matter:-) What matters
here is of course the first line which with the help of regular
expressions AND the /g modifier (which forces Perl to match
globally) does the whole dirty work... Naturally, this script might
be generalized for the general case when one deals with the
quotation marks of the form: ">>>XYZ>>VTN>>" etc., it's not a
problem to do so (maybe, couple of minutes at most)...
So at first I thought it would be just as simple as that to
implement somewhat similar in terms of TB regular expressions,
but... To begin with, TB doesn't allow one to match globally:-((
So, has anybody some idea how to do the trick without global
search?
If there exists no such possibility, here's a wishlist item #1:
1. Add the Global match modifier, please!
Note that the proposed functionality might prove to be quite
useful for a wide range of tasks. I could probably expand this
thought further and prove the point, but I'm leaving it up to you:-)
Now let's go further in our discussion of regular expressions
and what one might do with them:-)... Suppose I do something
with, say, %HEADERS string (i.e., manipulate it using regular
expressions). The most obvious task would be correcting that
odd TB's mistake when it puts the *localized* message creation
date as the result of %ODATE macro. It's of course quite
simple to do the trick, but then one would need to update each
and every template correspondingly. This would be greatly
simplified if one could *define* _new_ macros this way:
%MYODATE="(the sequence of templates defining the new
one)"
Apparently, currently one hasn't such functionality available. So
the wishlist item #2 is:
2. Implement the possibility to define new templates based on
the existing ones, please!
Obviously, these user-defined templates need to be system-
wide and there needs to be some place where their definitions
are to be stored (and edited by the user), for example, this
could be a new page in Account Preferences or any other:-)
**********
Okay, this message proved to be rather long one, but anyhow,
what do you think?
--
SY, Alex
(St.Petersburg, Russia)
http://mph.phys.spbu.ru/~akiselev
---
Thought for the day:
If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is
damned near zero.
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