WoWInterface - Lua string parsing

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Ego	11-08-05 10:36 AM

Lua string parsing

I'm looking for a bit of help with parsing a string in Lua.

The pattern I've got is 4 numeric values separated by commas.
Something that look like "1, 2, 3, 4"

I want to split out each value into 4 separate local variables,
for example a, b, c, d.

It would be nice if the spaces between them were optional,
and something that could handle if less than 4 values are
present.

I haven't learned enough on parsing strings in Lua, so if
anyone can provide some help, I'd appreciate it.

Littlejohn

11-11-05 03:19 PM

text = "1, 2, 3, 4"

_, _, a, b, c, d = string.find(text, "(%d+), (%d+), (%d+), (%d+)")

That is probably too finicky for use in the real world -- it won't match if there are extra spaces around the commas for example. This allows any number of spaces:

_, _, a, b, c, d = string.find(text, "(%d+)%s*,%s*(%d+)%s*,%s*(%d+)%s*,%s*(%d+)")

That's getting complicated enough that you may want to build up the pattern string.rep:

_, _, a, b, c, d = string.find(text, string.rep("(%d+)%s*,%s*", 3) .. "(%d+)")

Littlejohn

11-11-05 04:18 PM

If you're going for something that's quick+easy to enter, you might want to skip the comma separated list idea -- it's kind of programmerish ya know? Here's a little function that just grabs all the numbers out of a string. Some mods seem to be overly picky with chat command syntax. (Flexbar comes to mind...) People might like it if your mod is ultra lazy with the chat syntax.

Code:

function get_numbers(t)

    local w = { }

    for x in string.gfind(t, "(%d+)") do

        table.insert(w, x)

    end

    return w

end



local n = get_numbers("  1 , 2,3,        4 5-6 ")



print(n[1], n[2], n[3]) -- print first 3 numbers

print(table.concat(n, ", ") .. "\n") -- print all the numbers found

Ego	11-15-05 09:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Littlejohn

Thanks for the code and advice. I got it working using the gfind() method.
Now just got to package up my mod and get it posted. :)

And I went with the no commas in the chat command. Although the code
provided will ignore them and other stuff, so I guess it doesn't matter.

Thanks,

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