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On Mon, 10 Aug 2009, Stefan Ram wrote:

> Neil <> writes:
>> I am having trouble figuring out how to write a regular expression to
>> parse our parts of a url.
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/200707050...erl/url3.regex

Nice. But since all those groups are non-capturing, completely bloody
useless!

tom

--
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years
before I was born. -- Mark Twain

On Aug 10, 4:48*pm, Tom Anderson <t...@urchin.earth.li> wrote:
> Firstly, the repeated group as written has no way to admit slashes
> *between* pairs of path elements.

Yes! I see it now. Thank you.

> Secondly, you get one matching group per occurrence of a capturing group
> in the *pattern*, not per occurrence of the subpattern in the match. That
> is, if the above pair group matches five times, you'll still only get a
> single pair of captured groups (the last ones). That, i think, means
> there's no way to use a regular expression to do what you want to do here..

I did not realize this was a limitation of the regex matching.

I will use split.

Thanks,
Neil

--
Neil Aggarwal, (281)846-8957, www.JAMMConsulting.com
Will your e-commerce site go offline if you have
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If so, ask about our geographically redundant database system.

Roedy Green wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:35:04 -0700 (PDT), Neil
> <> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
> who said :
>
>> http://jammconsulting.com/jamm/page/...Backpacks.html
>
> Complicated regexes are such a bitch to debug. We need a tool that
> shows you just how far it got.


I use a little regex tester that I wrote. It's a Jar file that pops up
a gui that allows me to test regex against a pattern. It's really handy
and faster than making a new project in the IDE, and running compiles
against a Java string.

I'll post it if you think it would be generally useful.

Stefan Ram wrote:
> Neil <> writes:
>> I am having trouble figuring out how to write a regular expression to
>> parse our parts of a url.
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/200707050...erl/url3.regex
>


That hurted my brain.

On Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:49:16 +0100, Tom Anderson
<> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

>Writing a loop to iterate over the elements of the chunks array in pairs
>is a pain, but a very minor one.

You don't even have to. Split tosses out the '/'s for you. You just
have to choose a magic subscript to bypass the unwanted lead fields.

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"You can have quality software, or you can have pointer arithmetic; but you cannot have both at the same time."
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 59) 1989, creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

On Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:07:54 -0700 (PDT), Neil
<> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
who said :

>
>I did not realize this was a limitation of the regex matching.

Regexes have a number of limitations. They can't, for example ensure
() are balanced. When they run out of steam, try a parser.

See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/parser.html
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"You can have quality software, or you can have pointer arithmetic; but you cannot have both at the same time."
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 59) 1989, creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

On Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:19:48 -0700, markspace <>
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

>
>If you can write a custom parser in two minutes,

The problem with regexes is I never feel confident they are fully
debugged. With all the greedy/reluctant stuff the expected behaviour
becomes a matter of experiment, rather than something you just read.

Except for very simple ones, I never feel fully confident they are
correct.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"You can have quality software, or you can have pointer arithmetic; but you cannot have both at the same time."
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 59) 1989, creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

On Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:19:31 -0700, markspace <>
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

>
>That hurted my brain

I think it was an entry in an obsured coding contest.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"You can have quality software, or you can have pointer arithmetic; but you cannot have both at the same time."
~ Bertrand Meyer (born: 1950 age: 59) 1989, creator of design by contract and the Eiffel language.

On Mon, 10 Aug 2009, Roedy Green wrote:

> On Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:49:16 +0100, Tom Anderson
> <> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
> said :
>
>> Writing a loop to iterate over the elements of the chunks array in pairs
>> is a pain, but a very minor one.
>
> You don't even have to. Split tosses out the '/'s for you. You just
> have to choose a magic subscript to bypass the unwanted lead fields.

No, the OP wanted to process path elements in pairs. If he had:

prefix/a/b/c/d.html

Then he wanted to get two pairs

a + b
c + d

Split will give you an array {a, b, c, d}. You need to write something
like:

String[] elements = path.split("/");
for (int i = 0; i < elements.length; i += 2) {
String first = elements[i];
String second = elements[i + 1];
}

Except that as you say, you need to stick in a magic subscript to skip
over the boring bits at the start of the path.

tom

--
I think the Vengaboys compliment his dark visions splendidly well. -- Mark
Watson, on 'Do you listen to particular music when reading lovecraft?'

On Mon, 10 Aug 2009, Roedy Green wrote:

> On Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:07:54 -0700 (PDT), Neil
> <> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
> who said :
>
>> I did not realize this was a limitation of the regex matching.
>
> Regexes have a number of limitations. They can't, for example ensure
> () are balanced.

A popular myth!

Regular languages cannot balance parentheses. But regular expressions as
we know and use them outgrew being a regular language years ago - once you
have backreferences and other modern conveniences, you *can* do things
like balancing parens. Somehow.

tom

--
I think the Vengaboys compliment his dark visions splendidly well. -- Mark
Watson, on 'Do you listen to particular music when reading lovecraft?'