So, I tried to separate text in Lua. The following code perfectly separates a string with "§§§" as a separator.
local t={}
for str in string.gmatch(inputstr, "([^§§§]+)") do
table.insert(t, str)
end
So when I set inputstr="One§§§Two§§§Three" t comes out as {One, Two, Three}
But then I needed to separate a text with a ` in it. If I set inputstr="One§§§Two´Three" t comes out as {One, Two, �Three}.
I don't mind the unknown character symbol, but it also separates the string there.
I also tried some other uncommon symbols, for example, emojis have the same problem.
Anyone had the same problem or knows a solution for this?
Related
I have used GetText on an area of screen text and it has returned values separated by "\n". This is perfectly fine as there are line-breaks in the text and actually is exactly what I wanted, however, I want to convert the string into a list, splitting on the "\n".
My issue is that I get the following error from this line of foce:
put text split by "\\n" into itemList
Sensetalk compiler exception: syntax error - cant understand "n" at line.....
I initially thought there was a delimiting issue, having originally tried to split on "\n" so I switched to "\n" but the same error occurs..
How can you use the split function when there are escape sequences in the string?
many thanks
Depending on how OCR is reading this in, one of the predefined variables should be equivalent to your \n. I would expect this to work:
put text split by newline into itemList
You can find out more about predefined variables in SenseTalk here: https://docs.eggplantsoftware.com/studio/stk-restricted-words/#predefined-variables
I've been looking for a good way to see if a string of items are all numbers, and thought there might be a way of specifying a range from 0 to 9 and seeing if they're included in the string, but all that I've looked up online has really confused me.
def validate_pin(pin)
(pin.length == 4 || pin.length == 6) && pin.count("0-9") == pin.length
end
The code above is someone else's work and I've been trying to identify how it works. It's a pin checker - takes in a set of characters and ensures the string is either 4 or 6 digits and all numbers - but how does the range work?
When I did this problem I tried to use to_a? Integer and a bunch of other things including ranges such as (0..9) and ("0..9) and ("0".."9") to validate a character is an integer. When I saw ("0-9) it confused the heck out of me, and half an hour of googling and youtube has only left me with regex tutorials (which I'm interested in, but currently just trying to get the basics down)
So to sum this up, my goal is to understand a more semantic/concise way to identify if a character is an integer. Whatever is the simplest way. All and any feedback is welcome. I am a new rubyist and trying to get down my fundamentals. Thank You.
Regex really is the right way to do this. It's specifically for testing patterns in strings. This is how you'd test "do all characters in this string fall in the range of characters 0-9?":
pin.match(/\A[0-9]+\z/)
This regex says "Does this string start and end with at least one of the characters 0-9, with nothing else in between?" - the \A and \z are start-of-string and end-of-string matchers, and the [0-9]+ matches any one or more of any character in that range.
You could even do your entire check in one line of regex:
pin.match(/\A([0-9]{4}|[0-9]{6})\z/)
Which says "Does this string consist of the characters 0-9 repeated exactly 4 times, or the characters 0-9, repeated exactly 6 times?"
Ruby's String#count method does something similar to this, though it just counts the number of occurrences of the characters passed, and it uses something similar to regex ranges to allow you to specify character ranges.
The sequence c1-c2 means all characters between c1 and c2.
Thus, it expands the parameter "0-9" into the list of characters "0123456789", and then it tests how many of the characters in the string match that list of characters.
This will work to verify that a certain number of numbers exist in the string, and the length checks let you implicitly test that no other characters exist in the string. However, regexes let you assert that directly, by ensuring that the whole string matches a given pattern, including length constraints.
Count everything non-digit in pin and check if this count is zero:
pin.count("^0-9").zero?
Since you seem to be looking for answers outside regex and since Chris already spelled out how the count method was being implemented in the example above, I'll try to add one more idea for testing whether a string is an Integer or not:
pin.to_i.to_s == pin
What we're doing is converting the string to an integer, converting that result back to a string, and then testing to see if anything changed during the process. If the result is =>true, then you know nothing changed during the conversion to an integer and therefore the string is only an Integer.
EDIT:
The example above only works if the entire string is an Integer and won’t properly deal with leading zeros. If you want to check to make sure each and every character is an Integer then do something like this instead:
pin.prepend(“1”).to_i.to_s(1..-1) == pin
Part of the question seems to be exactly HOW the following portion of code is doing its job:
pin.count("0-9")
This piece of the code is simply returning a count of how many instances of the numbers 0 through 9 exist in the string. That's only one piece of the relevant section of code though. You need to look at the rest of the line to make sense of it:
pin.count("0-9") == pin.length
The first part counts how many instances then the second part compares that to the length of the string. If they are equal (==) then that means every character in the string is an Integer.
Sometimes negation can be used to advantage:
!pin.match?(/\D/) && [4,6].include?(pin.length)
pin.match?(/\D/) returns true if the string contains a character other than a digit (matching /\D/), in which case it it would be negated to false.
One advantage of using negation here is that if the string contains a character other than a digit pin.match?(/\D/) would return true as soon as a non-digit is found, as opposed to methods that examine all the characters in the string.
Hi I've been struggling with this for the last hour and am no closer. How exactly do I strip everything except numbers, commas and decimal points from a rails string? The closest I have so far is:-
rate = rate.gsub!(/[^0-9]/i, '')
This strips everything but the numbers. When I try add commas to the expression, everything is getting stripped. I got the aboves from somewhere else and as far as I can gather:
^ = not
Everything to the left of the comma gets replaced by what's in the '' on the right
No idea what the /i does
I'm very new to gsub. Does anyone know of a good tutorial on building expressions?
Thanks
Try:
rate = rate.gsub(/[^0-9,\.]/, '')
Basically, you know the ^ means not when inside the character class brackets [] which you are using, and then you can just add the comma to the list. The decimal needs to be escaped with a backslash because in regular expressions they are a special character that means "match anything".
Also, be aware of whether you are using gsub or gsub!
gsub! has the bang, so it edits the instance of the string you're passing in, rather than returning another one.
So if using gsub! it would be:
rate.gsub!(/[^0-9,\.]/, '')
And rate would be altered.
If you do not want to alter the original variable, then you can use the version without the bang (and assign it to a different var):
cleaned_rate = rate.gsub!(/[^0-9,\.]/, '')
I'd just google for tutorials. I haven't used one. Regexes are a LOT of time and trial and error (and table-flipping).
This is a cool tool to use with a mini cheat-sheet on it for ruby that allows you to quickly edit and test your expression:
http://rubular.com/
You can just add the comma and period in the square-bracketed expression:
rate.gsub(/[^0-9,.]/, '')
You don't need the i for case-insensitivity for numbers and symbols.
There's lots of info on regular expressions, regex, etc. Maybe search for those instead of gsub.
You can use this:
rate = rate.gsub!(/[^0-9\.\,]/g,'')
Also check this out to learn more about regular expressions:
http://www.regexr.com/
Could anybody help me make a proper regular expression from a bunch of text in Ruby. I tried a lot but I don't know how to handle variable length titles.
The string will be of format <sometext>title:"<actual_title>"<sometext>. I want to extract actual_title from this string.
I tried /title:"."/ but it doesnt find any matches as it expects a closing quotation after one variable from opening quotation. I couldn't figure how to make it check for variable length of string. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
. matches any single character. Putting + after a character will match one or more of those characters. So .+ will match one or more characters of any sort. Also, you should put a question mark after it so that it matches the first closing-quotation mark it comes across. So:
/title:"(.+?)"/
The parentheses are necessary if you want to extract the title text that it matched out of there.
/title:"([^"]*)"/
The parentheses create a capturing group. Inside is first a character class. The ^ means it's negated, so it matches any character that's not a ". The * means 0 or more. You can change it to one or more by using + instead of *.
I like /title:"(.+?)"/ because of it's use of lazy matching to stop the .+ consuming all text until the last " on the line is found.
It won't work if the string wraps lines or includes escaped quotes.
In programming languages where you want to be able to include the string deliminator inside a string you usually provide an 'escape' character or sequence.
If your escape character was \ then you could write something like this...
/title:"((?:\\"|[^"])+)"/
This is a railroad diagram. Railroad diagrams show you what order things are parsed... imagine you are a train starting at the left. You consume title:" then \" if you can.. if you can't then you consume not a ". The > means this path is preferred... so you try to loop... if you can't you have to consume a '"' to finish.
I made this with https://regexper.com/#%2Ftitle%3A%22((%3F%3A%5C%5C%22%7C%5B%5E%22%5D)%2B)%22%2F
but there is now a plugin for Atom text editor too that does this.
let's say that I have an XML file containing this :
<description><![CDATA[
<h2>lorem ipsum</h2>
<p>some text</p>
]]></description>
that I want to get and parse in ActionScript 2 as HTML text, and setting some CSS before displaying it. Problem is, Flash takes those whitespaces (line feed and tab) and display it as it is.
<some whitespace here>
lorem ipsum
some text
where the output I want is
lorem ipsum
some text
I know that I could remove the whitespaces directly from the XML file (the Flash developer at my workplace also suggests this. I guess that he doesn't have any idea on how to do this [sigh]). But by doing this, it would be difficult to read the section in the XML file, especially when lots of tags are involved and that makes editing more difficult.
So now, I'm looking for a way to strip those whitespaces in ActionScript. I've tried to use PHP's str_replace equivalent (got it from here). But what should I use as a needle (string to search) ? (I've tried to put in "\t" and "\r", don't seem to be able to detect those whitespaces).
edit :
now that I've tried to throw in newline as a needle, it works (meaning that newline successfully got stripped).
mystring = str_replace(newline, '', mystring);
But, newlines only got stripped once, meaning that in every consecutive newlines, (eg. a newline followed by another newline) only one newline can be stripped away.
Now, I don't see that this as a problem in the str_replace function, since every consecutive character other than newline get stripped away just fine.
Pretty much confused about how stuff like this is handled in ActionScript. :-s
edit 2:
I've tried str_replace -ing everything I know of, \n, \r, \t, newline, and tab (by pressing tab key). Replacing \n, \r, and \t seem to have no effect whatsoever.
I know that by successfully doing this, my content can never have real line breaks. That's exactly my intention. I could format the XML the way I want without Flash displaying any of the formatting stuff. :)
Several ways to approach this. Perhaps the simplest answer is, in one sense your Flash developer is probably right, and you should move your whitespace outside of the CDATA container. The reason being, many people (me at least) tend to assume that everything inside a CDATA is "real data", as opposed to markup. On the other hand, whitespace outside a CDATA is normally assumed to be irrelevant, so data like this:
<description>
<![CDATA[<h2>lorem ipsum</h2>
<p>some text</p>]]>
</description>
would be easier to understand and to work with. (The flash developer can use the XML.ignoreWhite property to ignore the whitespace outside the CDATA.)
With that said, if you're editing the XML by hand, then I can see why it would be easier to use the formatting you describe. However, if the extra whitespace is inside the CDATA, then it will inevitable be included in the String data you extract, so your only option is to grab the content of the CDATA and remove the whitespace afterwards.
Then your question reduces to "how do I strip leading/trailing whitespace from a String in AS2?". And unfortunately, since AS2 doesn't support RegEx there's no simple way to do this. I think your best option would be to parse through from the beginning and end to find the first/last non-white character. Something along these lines (untested pseudocode):
myString = stuffFromXML;
whitespace = " " + "\t" + "\n" + "\r" + newline;
start = 0;
end = myString.length;
while ( testString( myString.substr(start,1), whitespace ) ) { start++; }
while ( testString( myString.substr(end-1,1), whitespace ) ) { end--; }
trimmedString = myString.substring( start, end );
function testString( needle, haystack ) {
return ( haystack.indexOf( needle ) > -1 );
}
Hope that helps!
Edit: I notice that in your example you'd also need to remove tabs and whitespace within your text data. This would be tricky, unless you can guarantee that your data will never include "real" tabs in addition to the ones for formatting. No matter what you do with the CDATA tags, it would probably be wiser not to insert extraneous formatting inside your real content and then remove it programmatically afterward. That's just making your own life difficult.
Second edit: As for what character to remove to get rid of newlines, it depends partially on what characters are actually in the XML to begin with (which probably depends on what OS is running where the file is generated), and partially on what character the client machine (that's showing the flash) considers a newline. Lots of gory details here. In practice though, if you remove \r, \n, and \r\n, that usually does the trick. That's why I added both \r and \n to the "whitespace" string in my example code.
its been a while since I've tinkered with AS2.
someXML = new XML();
someXML.ignoreWhite = true;
if you wanted to str_replace try '\n'
Is there a reason that you are using cdata? Admittedly I have no idea what the best practice for this sort of this is, but I tend to leave them out and just have the HTML sit there inside the node.
var foo = node.childnodes.join("") parses it out just fine and I never seem to come across these whitespace problems.
I'm reading this over and over again, and if I'm interpreting you right, all you want to know how to do is strip certain characters (tabs and newlines) from a string in AS2, right? I cannot believe no one has given you the simple one line answer yet:
myString = myString.split("\n").join("");
That's it. Repeat that for \r, \n, and \t and all newlines and tabs will be gone. If you want it as an easy function, then do this:
function stripWhiteSpace(str: String) : String
{
return str.split("\r").join("").split("\n").join("").split("\t").join("");
}
That function won't modify your old string, it will return a new one without \r, \n, or \t. To actually modify the old string use that function like this:
myString = stripWhiteSpace(myString);