Help with string manipulation?
So I'm trying to make a program that decodes a string value, to find certain blocks of text and do things with it. I'm having but one problem, and I feel like it's easy and I'm just missing something. Here are my attempts:
local Source = "Testing <hello world> Ended message 1 <test 2> Ended second message"
local function CompileText(fromSource)
for s in string.gmatch(fromSource, "<[%a%s%p%d]+>") do
print(s) -- should print '<test 2>' and '<hello world> ' on TWO different lines
end
end
CompileText(Source)
So basically, I'm trying to make it so that the for loop will run for each <text> block that exists, but for some reason it just prints the entire line of text, even though there are two <text> formatted codes in the string (<hello world> and <test 2>).
I put the [%a%s%p%d]+ in the string pattern so that text in between the < > symbols won't be ignored, or interfere with the process (it'll just be normal text). This is what I'm trying to get it to print:
<hello world>
<test 2>
If anyone could help me with this, I'd be very grateful.
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1 answer
The problem is that <blah> blah blah <blah> matches your pattern -- it begins with < and ends with > and the middle is made of only spaces , letters [blah] and punctuation [><].
One way to fix that is to use - instead of + -- this makes Lua match as few characters as possible, instead of as many.
Perhaps a better way is to not use <[%a%s%p%d]+> but instead to use <[^>]+> -- everything except the character ">" can be inside, which is much closer to the pattern you yourself use when you parse things like this when you read. > must mean the end, so make it so!
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