stupid Perl regexp Compatability on Lookbehind assertions like (?<=ab(c|de))

[armor]

I have been working on this for two days debugging, with no clue at all, till I found out in the document telling me that the Perl Engine (which autoit uses) does not allow grammar like (?<=ab(c|de)), please refer to the docu below:

http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/pcrepattern.html

"

However, if there are several top-level alternatives, they do not all have to have the same fixed length. Thus

(?<=bullock|donkey)

is permitted, but

(?<!dogs?|cats?)

causes an error at compile time. Branches that match different length strings are permitted only at the top level of a lookbehind assertion. This is an extension compared with Perl (at least for 5.8), which requires all branches to match the same length of string. An assertion such as

(?<=ab(c|de))

is not permitted, because its single top-level branch can match two different lengths, but it is acceptable if rewritten to use two top-level branches:

(?<=abc|abde)

"

So is there any alternaltive way to do the task like (?<=\w+) . Thanks,

[PsaltyDS]

Your "(?<=ab(c|de))" is just rewritten as "(?<=abc|abde)", and then it works as explained in that doc.

Your "(?<=\w+)" doesn't make any sense. What are you trying to get?

[armor]

Your "(?<=ab(c|de))" is just rewritten as "(?<=abc|abde)", and then it works as explained in that doc.

Your "(?<=\w+)" doesn't make any sense. What are you trying to get?

Thanks for replying.

Actually I want to parse an HTML code and retrieves those words between the HTML tags, e.g.

<a> this is a program</a>

<b> to retrieve the sentences bwteen tags and break down into words</b>

will be broken down into

this

is

a

program

to

retrieve

the

sentences

bwteen

tags

and

break

down

into

words

by using the Regular Expression

(?<=>[^<>]*)([^<>\s\n\r]+)(?=[^<>]*<)

The Regular Expression I am using works well in some parser but not in AutoIt.

Please see the attachement. thanks,

[GEOSoft]

#Include<array.au3> ;; For _ArrayDisplay() only
$sTxt = "<a> this is a program</a>" & @LF
$sTxt &= "<b> to retrieve the sentences bwteen tags and break down into words</b>"

$aMatch = StringRegExp(StringRegExpReplace($sTxt, "(?i)(<.+?>)", ""), "(?i)(\b\w+\b)", 3)
If NOT @Error Then
    _ArrayDisplay($aMatch)
Else
    MsgBox(0, "Error", "No match was found")
EndIf

[Malkey]

$sTxt = "<a> this is a program</a>" & @CRLF & _
        "<b> to retrieve the sentences between tags and break down into words</b>"

MsgBox(0, "Word List", StringRegExpReplace(StringRegExpReplace($sTxt, "(?i)(<.+?>)", ""), _
        "\s*([^\s]+)\s+", "\1" & @CRLF))

[MvGulik]

nevermind

Edited January 1, 2010 by MvGulik