If so...

how do you match a whole word from a string.

eg. word = "test"

String = "test, test testing....test;"

I need it to match all of those apart from the "test" part of "testing".

Thanks in advance

Simon

 

Depends what you're using, but in Perl it's /\btest\b/

(\b for word boundary)

HTH,
James

 

what language Simon?

 

JV

thank you very much. It's actually in PHP.. don't suppose you know if this will use the same format do you? Apologies, I am useless at this!

Cheers

Simon

 

the actual requirement is to replace the word with another word wherever it appears... but only the full word.

Cheers
Simon

 

Not sure about PHP, but this might help:

http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

 

Then cant you do a simple replace function that looks for [space]WORD[space] rather than a regular expression that might strip out content from within another string?

 

That's what \b does. You can't look for /\stest\s/ since that won't change something like "test, ".

 

JV

Perfect! Thank you very much, that's done the job

All the best

Simon

 

I think the 'regexp' (purist!??) way would be to use a character class eg {., }word{., } which will match any of the supplied options (rather than the /b); regexp being language independant.

That said, if php supplies a /b style option, use it, it's a lot easier the generating a complex regexp!

 

Character classes are done with square brackets rather than curly braces, which are used for matching repetition. The regex purist will use what's available in the implementation, rather than sticking to one way of doing things If the PHP regular expression parser is POSIX compliant it should be ok.

 

OK..

it gets more complicated....

I'm using the \b thing which works perfectly... thank you...

But.. I want it to ignore the text if it is within certain specific tags...

best example would be in html...

testing test <a href="http://www.test.com">test</a> test <img src="http://www.test.com/image.jpg">

in this example, I would want it to ignore the two "test"s between "<a href" and "</a>" and also ignore the test inbetween "<img" and ">"

is this possible, or does it get way too complex?

Cheers

Simon

 

fussy b@stard!

 

LOL

 

how about a routine that scans the page and replaces everything between "<a href" and "/a>" with spaces. same with "<img" tags and then do your /b thingie?

kinda like a mid(rah, rah, rah)=space$(1) in vb

 

Was trying to use a regular expression to avoid parsing all the text each time for performance.

If it can't be done in one regular expression, I guess I'll have to run two processes on it.


Cheers
Simon

 

Regex matching is anything but efficient so you're already imposing a performance hit using them, even if you precompile it. You can't do what you want with one regular expression, you'd be better off with a mixture of some kind of SAX parser (so you can ignore all the HTML tags) and regex the substitution.

Hmm, saying that, I just did this:

my $word_to_replace = 'test';
my $new_word = 'april fools day';

$html =~ s!(>[^<]*?\b)$word_to_replace\b!$new_word!gi;

 

or maybe I wont try to talk about things I know nowt about

Deano