Hi! On Tue, 30 Aug 2005 19:27:30 +0200, Randy Gerritse <randy@randy.nu> wrote:

First of all I've gotta say, having tested all the available regex tools, your regex coach is farout the best.

Thanks... :)

However, one thing has been bugging me A LOT. You don't seem to support named groups! Since this makes the output in the language I use, PHP, a lot more userfriendly (and less subject to change if you alter the expression) I use this language feature a lot:

class="cell2">.*?(?P<downloads>(\d{1,3},{0,1}){0,5})\s*& .*?class="cell5">(?P<requirements>.*?)<\/td> .*?<td>Publisher:<\/td> \s*<td>(?P<publisher>.*?)<\/td> .*?<td>Limitations:<\/td> \s*<td>(?P<limitations>.*?)<\/td> .*?<td>Date.added:<\/td> \s*<td>(?P<published>.*?)<\/td> .*?<div.id="desc-body">\s*?(?P<longdesc>.*?)\s*?<\/div>

like in the above example (which by the way your tool processes correctly except for the named groups, where most other tested tools failed!)

in the documentation I found it says that this format:

(?P<longdesc>group)

...has been adapted from python and made part of the standard... is there a reason you have not put it in the tool? and is it possible to start supporting it? that would be a BIG help!!! right now I need to strip out all names before testing and that sux0rs... it would make your tool the best out there, by a mile..!

The reason for not supporting named groups is that they're not in Perl. CL-PPCRE, my regex library on which Regex Coach is based, tries to be Perl-compatible. Cheers, Edi.