At 19:55 07/11/2013 +1300, Steve Edmonds wrote:
On 2013-11-07 18:23, Brian Barker wrote:
At 16:55 07/11/2013 +1300, Steve Edmonds wrote:
I am trying to find and replace some text with regex in calc. Can
anyone help with how I make it non-greedy.
I think the answer is that you don't: you must find a way of
constructing a suitable expression despite such expressions being greedy.
I tried \([:digit:].*?[:digit:]\) in place of
\([:digit:].*[:digit:]\) but both are greedy. When the following
(12-34-23) cat (233) is in a selected cell it replaces both
instances between ().
By the way, I don't understand your ".*?" - do you perhaps mean
either ".*" or ".?" ?
I'm afraid you've fallen into the common trap of attempting to
define your problem by quoting only expressions that *don't*
work! Which parenthesised string do you want to match? I'm
guessing the first.
But what exactly are the characteristics of the strings you want to
match? And the ones you want not to match?
Is the target string always at the beginning? Try:
\<\([^\)]*\)
Is the target string always digits-hyphen-digits-hyphen-digits? Try:
\([:digit:]+-[:digit:]+-[:digit:]+\)
or:
\(\d+-\d+-\d+\)
Do you want to match the second string instead? Try:
\([:digit:]+\)
or:
\(\d+\)
Depending on exactly what you want to match and to avoid matching,
you may have to do something different.
Sorry I am not that clear now I read it again. In non-LO regex I
would use the following (ignoring the quotes)
\(\d.*\d\) to find "(12-34-23) cat (239)"
You are now saying you want to match the entire string - but I
suspect you don't mean that.
... in a string (12-34-23) cat (233) the .* is greedy and gobbles
everything between the (1 and 9). the ? after the .*, i.e. .*? would
be non-greedy and would match (12-34-23) and (239) without including the cat.
So you actually want to match *both* parenthesised strings but not
whatever else there is? Is that no matter what is in the
parentheses? This is still not a defined problem.
In LO you use [:digit:] in place of \d.
No: you can now use \d as well.
If the parentheses can contain anything (except parentheses), try:
\([^\)]*\)
This will need two finds to find two parenthesised strings, but if
you are using Replace All that won't matter.
Brian Barker
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