Regular Expression Trigger

Posted by Xavious on Mon 27 Apr 2009 08:36 AM — 3 posts, 15,956 views.

Xavious Mon 27 Apr 2009 08:36 AM #0

What I'm trying to accomplish isn't very difficult. The only limitation is my knowledge of how to utilize regular expressions. Example trigger text:
SpiderDrider the avatar of Lloth flies north.

I have two wild cards that I certainly need.. so here is my generic version:

* flies *.

%1 for the character name and %2 for the direction of travel

My problem is that after the character name they could have any number of other words identifying the title, but I only need the first word to be saved. In the example above it would be "SpiderDrider", however the extra text accompanying is "the avatar of Lloth." I need a way to weed out the additional words no matter how many there may be.

Worstje Netherlands Mon 27 Apr 2009 05:17 PM #1

^(\w+) .*flies (.+)\.$

Explanation of the above regular expression:

^   - Line begins here.
\w  - any alphanumeric character.
\w+ - one or more of any alphanumeric character.
.   - any character.
.*  - zero or more of any character.
.+  - one or more of any character.
\.  - A simple, literal .
$   - Line ends here.

The () specify captures, or in other words, allow the values matched within them to be assigned to %1, %2 and so forth.

Xavious Wed 29 Apr 2009 09:00 AM #2

I appreciate the help. I'm going to have to get the hang of regular expressions, so I can accomplish more complex data capture. I haven't got this trigger to work yet, but I've also redefined my strategy on this game :)