[Gambas-user] RegExp.Replace() question

[Tobias Boege]

On Sat, 29 Apr 2017, Fernando Cabral wrote:
> Benoît
> 
> I am prety new to Gambas, but quite an old hand with regular expression
> (almost from the time when sed, awk and vi were created. All of them allow
> heavy use of regular expression). It took me many hours to understand that,
> contrary to customs,
> Gambas regex are ungreedy. It took me some more hours to find out that "?"
> could be used to make the operators
> + and * to work as usual (I mean, for old hands like me). And half an hour
> more to find out that "&1" replace the older "\1" and not so old "$1".
> Those things are annoying when you are getting used to a new lingo.
> 

But these two things could have been cleared up by looking at the right
portion(!) of the documentation, which is often hard to find in the
beginning, I know.

RegExp.Replace() is a method of the RegExp class which resides in the
gb.pcre component. Its main page in the wiki [1] tells you that PCRE are
Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions and links to the libpcre [2] page
for its syntax. The Replace() method page [3] itself tells you to use
"&1" for backreferences. This is for consistency with the Subst$()
intrinsic function and other substitution functions in Gambas which
came before RegExp.Replace() -- all of them use "&1".

And for the future: you will encounter another type of regular expressions
much more often in Gambas than the PCREs, namely the LIKE expressions [4].
You will notice that they are very primitive, maybe too primitive if you're
used to sed-style expressions, and have an incompatible syntax.

Regards,
Tobi

[1] http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/comp/gb.pcre
[2] http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/doc/pcre
[3] http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/comp/gb.pcre/regexp/replace
[4] http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/lang/like

-- 
"There's an old saying: Don't change anything... ever!" -- Mr. Monk