Re: Regular Expressions?

FROM : Vincent E.
DATE : Fri Jun 06 19:27:53 2008

When I mentioned "perl -pe 's/\b(.*?)/\u\L$1/g'" I actually wasn't 
asking for any ObjC method with a look-alike syntax.
I actually wouldn't give a damn about "how" ("s///g") to pass a regex 
pattern to a method. ;)

I was rather asking whether RegExKit (or even RegExKitLite?) would 
generally be able to perform RegEx driven string replacements
where the replacement string contains stuff like "match back-
references" (\1, \2, \<named>, …) or string modificators like "\L, \U".

Now to answer my own question:

RegExKit has this function which (according to the documentation) 
seems to do just what I was looking for:
[subjectString stringByMatching:regexString 
withReferenceString:templateString];

And for the latter (\L, \U, etc) I unfortunately had to find this in 
the PCRE documentation:
5.    The  following Perl escape sequences are not supported: \l, \u, 
\L,
        \U, and \N. In fact these are implemented by Perl's general 
string-han-
        dling  and are not part of its pattern matching engine. If any 
of these
        are encountered by PCRE, an error is generated.
http://www.pcre.org/pcre.txt

Thanks a lot any way.
Vincent

On Jun 6, 2008, at 4:45 PM, Jason Stephenson wrote:
> Would something like this be acceptable?
>
> [someString replacePattern: @"\\b(.*?)" with: @"\\u\\L$1" flags: 
> @"g"];



On Jun 6, 2008, at 6:16 PM, David Hoerl wrote:

>> dream cat7 wrote:

>>>
>> > I agree that to be able to use that syntax is highly desirable, and
>>> indeed missing from all the cocoa libraries that I have looked at. 
>>> One
>>> way would be a category addition to NSString class, which would call
>>> the  perl -pe 's/\b(.*?)/\u\L$1/g' for you and return the result 
>>> as an
>>> NSString...
>>>
>>> But unfortunately nobody has come up that type of an extension to
>>> NSString yet.
>>> Or are there and c-libraries that will accept this s//// syntax ?