I'm new to Lua and I'm sure this is a silly problem.
I was trying to remove first 3 characters from a string with string.gsub
Here is the code:
string.gsub(m, "/jk", "", 1)
Now "/jk" are the first 3 chars the string, now, string.gsub adds a space instead of removing them. My question is, how to remove them without adding the space?
string.gsub doesn't add a space unless you ask it to, and in your pasted code you aren't asking it to. Are you sure there wasn't already a space after the /jk in the string?
Also, if you're just trying to remove the first 3 characters, you should use string.sub(m, 4).
Related
If I have a search: (\d\d):(\d\d) and I want to add an extra 0 to the numbers that I find (ie, 12:30 would become 120:130), how do I prevent the 0 being interpreted as \10 and \20:
\10:\20
I tried escaping it with \ but that just made more backreferences. Is there another way to escape in grep?
In your original post, you didn't mention that you're using these backreferences in the replacement pattern, not the search pattern. You also didn't mention that you're using BBEdit. Solving your problem requires both of those facts.
From page 209 of the BBEdit manual:
\NNN+
If more than two decimal digits follow the backslash, only the first two are considered part of the backreference. Thus, “\111” would be interpreted as the 11th backreference, followed by a literal “1”. You may use a leading zero; for example, if in your replacement pattern you want the first backreference followed by a literal “1”, you can use “\011”. (If you use “\11”, you will get the 11th backreference, even if it is empty.)
Therefore you should try this replacement pattern:
\010:\020
I am tryng to get rid of shortcodes inside a Google Sheet column. I have many items such as [spacer type="1" height="20"][spacer] or [FinalTilesGallery id="37"] I just would like to cancel them. Is there any simple way to do it?
Thanks !
For in-place replacement, the quick option would be to use the Find and Replace dialog (Ctrl + H) with Search Using Regular Expressions turned on, which is more powerful than your standard Find and Replace.
Find: \[.*?\] - Match anything within an open-bracket up to the very next close-bracket. This should work assuming you have no nested brackets, e.g. [[no][no]].
If you do have nested brackets, you'll have to change this to \[[^\[\]]*\]. And continue to Replace All until all the codes are gone.
Replace: Nothing.
Replace All. If you don't want to affect other sheets that may be in your document, make sure you select the right range to work with, too.
This just erases everything within the brackets.
If you want to erase any redundant spaces left by this, simply Find and Replace again (with Regular Expressions) on + (space and plus), which will match 1 or more spaces and replace with (single space).
E.g.:
string [] [] string2 -> string string2 after the shortcode replacement.
After replacing spaces, it will become string string2.
Let's say your original strings are in the range A2:A. Place the following into B2 of an otherwise completely empty Column B (or the second cell of any other empty column):
=ArrayFormula(IF(A2:A="",,TRIM(REGEXREPLACE(A2:A,"\[[^\[\]]+\]",""))))
I can't see your data, so I don't know what kind of information is between these shortcodes. If you find that this leaves you with concatenated pieces of data where there should be spaces between them, replace the above with this version:
=ArrayFormula(IF(A2:A="",,TRIM(REGEXREPLACE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2:A,"["," ["),"]","] "),"\[[^\[\]]+\]",""))))
I can't teach regular expression language here. But I will note that, since square brackets have specific meaning within regex, your literal square brackets must be indicated with the escape character: the backslash.
Here is the regex expression alone:
\[[^\[\]]+\]
The opening \[ and the closing \], then, reference your actual opening and closing bracket sets. If we remove those, we have this left:
[^\[\]]+
Again, you see the escaped opening and closing square brackets, which I'll replace with the word these:
[^these]+
What remains there are opening and closing brackets with regex meaning, i.e., "anything in this group." And the circumflex symbol ^ as the first character within this set of square brackets means "anything except." The + symbol means "in any string length of one or more characters."
So that whole regex expression then reads: "A literal open square bracket, followed by one or more characters that are anything except square brackets, ending with a literal closing square bracket."
And we are REGEXREPLACE-ing any instance of that with "" (i.e., nothing).
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?
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/
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);