Additional help with replace trigger

While searching for a trigger to replace the output of one string with another (while omitting the original), I came across http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=12083 . This was exactly what I needed!

It was mentioned in this thread that there was a method to have the resulting output displayed in the original color rather than the note color, and this is why I am back again.

The trigger I copied from that linked thread does work wonderfully but I was wondering how one goes about achieving the original output color as mentioned therein. Is this an incredibly complicated process or is it something that even a complete novice would be able to pull off?

Thank you in advance for any help that might be provided!

Relatively speaking, yes. [1]


No. :\ [2]

Output substitution has always been a 2nd, maybe 3rd, 4th, or 5th class citizen for MUSHclient.
You can sort of do it, but doing it well is definitely not easy.

[1] - Actually, I know of two and a half ways to do this. 1.5 ways are very complicated and also do not work at all on GMCP. They involve a big song and dance of figuring out where to do your substitution on some data structures that hold chunks of text and color information, and then recombining the old colors with the new text for printing. The other way works also on GMCP and is significantly less complicated, but is simultaneously more obscure because it uses OnPluginPacketReceived instead of triggers and less obscure because it doesn't care about color style runs which for all I know aren't actually documented anywhere. All 2.5 ways require special extra extra effort if you want to match text across color boundaries.

Somewhat annoyingly, also, because there's no simple single built in "Substitute" function, you can't sanely do this with basic triggers. Realistically you need to make a plugin that both handles the logic of substitution and also the management of what to substitute for what.

For Aardwolf I've chosen to go with the one that works on GMCP using OnPluginPacketReceived instead of triggers, because Aardwolf sends player communication messages over GMCP.

[2] - Not without someone else already having done a bunch of work already for you and then digging around to find this post on the forum.

You can take a look at my plugin here:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fiendish/aardwolfclientpackage/MUSHclient/MUSHclient/worlds/plugins/text_substitution.xml

The general technique for keeping colours is mentioned there:



That was for sending to another world, but you can just as easily send to the same world. However changing the text is not trivial if it spans a style run. In fact, you could almost call it undefined. Let's say we have this:



And you want to have have a trigger that changes "The quick brown fox" to "The rapidly expanding universe" and keeps the colours. How does it even do that? By character position? By word count? By keeping the first colour (red in this case)?

If the word to be changed is in the same style (basically, the same colour, and same bold/underline/italic style) then you could just do a string.gsub on each style run rather than the whole line, and then re-output it as shown in the FAQ.

Here is an example, a trigger that changes "hp" to "HitPoints" in a prompt line, keeping the entire line in its original colour.



This is based on "hp" being a single colour (and thus being in one of the style runs).