formatting tooltip quest objective text

[ObbleYeah]

I'm currently grabbing the line of text displayed on the tooltip of a quest mob or item that tallies progress. — and I want to reformat the string returned slightly. This is the function i'm using to fetch the string:

local GetFormattedPVPOrObjectiveInfo = function()
    local source = _G['GameTooltipTextLeft4']
    local text = source:GetText()
    if source and text ~= nil then
        if text:find('^'..' - ') then     -- quest objective
            return text
        end
    else return '' end
end

i have a, uh, working knowledge of representative lua string symbols — and through a bit of dicking about discovered that changing line 6 to

return format('%s%s%s%s', 1, 1, 1, text)

will return



%s = 1
%s = 0
%s = .80
%s = - 0/6 rockjaw invader slain [the string i want]

is there a simple way to ditch the first 3 with gsub or some other string function, and then alter the 4th to remove the hyphen?

[Lombra]

return format('%s%s%s%s', 1, 1, 1, text)

I don't understand this. That's going to return something like "111text".

[ObbleYeah]

oh noooooo

welp, i am an idiot — for some reason i thought the formatting was format(' ', r, ,g ,b, text) and I was pulling some mystery internal sequencing rather than the exact colour code i'd just written. friday night coding

well i guess that answers my question. thanks!

edit: just for posterity:

local GetFormattedPVPOrObjectiveInfo = function()
    local source = _G["GameTooltipTextLeft4"]
    local text = source:GetText()
    if source and text ~= nil then
        if text:find('^'..' - ') then                -- quest objective
            text = text:gsub('-', '')            -- strip hyphen
            text = text:gsub('^%s*', '')     -- strip leading whitespace
            return text 
        end
    else return '' end
end

[Phanx]

You can condense this:

if text:find('^'..' - ') then                -- quest objective
            text = text:gsub('-', '')            -- strip hyphen
            text = text:gsub('^%s*', '')     -- strip leading whitespace
            return text

... to just this:

if text:find("^ - ") then -- why was there a concatenation operator in here?
            return text:sub(4)

Since your real goal is just to strip off the first 3 characters, just do that instead of beating around the bush with multiple gsub calls.