ID:134125
 May 26 2007, 7:39 pm
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Is there any chance regex will ever be included in DM?
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May 26 2007, 9:01 pm
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Elation
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No need.
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Unless you're cheap and don't want to shell out $5 for Lummox's Regex library. =)
That's unless hub://Theodis.RegEx is complete enough for your purposes; I haven't used it, so I don't know how much it does. It does say it's a "simple" one, and regex parsers tend to be pretty complex... | |
Crispy wrote:
Unless you're cheap and don't want to shell out $5 for Lummox's Regex library. =) That and the fact that a built-in regex parser will be much faster than any soft-coded one. | |
It does say it's a "simple" one, and regex parsers tend to be pretty complex... I haven't actually looked that closely at Theodis's parser, but it's actually not terribly difficult to write a parser that converts regexes into finite state machines, and it's trivial to run strings through those machines to find matches. I've done this in two separate languages, but unfortunately not in DM (yet). I'm guessing this is the method Theodis used. Backtracking parsers (ala Perl) are slightly more difficult to write, but don't look too incredibly hard. In theory, that is--as I haven't tried to write one, but I have read about the procedure. I do still think it would be beneficial for BYOND to have built-in regex handling (via a C library), but really, only a handful of us would ever use it. I'd rather see more cool glitzy 4.0 front-end features than neat back-end additions like this. | |
Popisfizzy wrote:
That and the fact that a built-in regex parser will be much faster than any soft-coded one. while true, i doubt you'd need the speed unless you were trying to parse something large, like the Magna Carta. for the majority of BYOND game needs, Lummox's or Theodis' should be more than fast enough. | |
