StringRegExp help with CRLF

[bigdogdan2]

I was trying to search for text within a file or output from a console and noticed the StringregExp had issues with new lines.  Like when I searched for text.*.joe  and the newline existed within the data?

So I tried a experiment

$AA = "text.*joe"    <--- This worked
MsgBox(0, "test", StringRegExp("text12testjohnjoe" & @CRLF & "dan" & @CRLF & "bob", $AA,0))

$AA = "text.*joe.*bob"    <--- This did not work

Is .* the wrong regular expression to skip unwanted data including newline?  Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Dan

[jchd]

Depends.

Read the help file again for StringRegExp under "Character Types". See that . (dot) matches or not a newline sequence depending on an option. Read up what this option does and fix your own pattern.

[bigdogdan2]

Thanks, I missed (?s) to change it to match on dotAll

$AA = "(?s)text.*joe.*bob"

This seems to include new line too.

[jchd]

Explain what the general form of the input is and what exactly you want to extract.

Because "searched for text .*joe  and the newline existed within the data" is ambiguous about whether or not you wanted newline sequences to remain within the captured "data". I took data to mean "everything meaningful".

You need mathematical-type precision when specifying what you need a regexp to do: for instance, newline sequences _are_ text.

If you want to capture something satisfying a more stringent criterion you must specify this criterion clearly.

[bigdogdan2]

I didn't mean to be ambiguous, I'm new to regex so I wasn't aware whats involved with asking questions about it and how to ask.  Your first post helped me figure out what I was missing though.

A file is read or a body of text captured in a variable.  and the user inputs texts or pattern to see if the data exists within the read data in the variable. 

And if the user wanted to search for more than 1 text that could be anywhere, they can input "hello.*dan.*goodbye" to ensure those 3 words exist within the body of text.  newline was stopping the regex from working correctly, so from your advice, I figured out that adding (?s) will changed the line to dotAll and now also skips newlines when I use .*

thanks

Edited April 3, 2014 by bigdogdan2