[REGEXPTITLE: difficulty with wildcards

[TimRude]

I'm trying to find a Window using WinGetHwnd("[REGEXPTITLE: ...]") but I can't figure out how to get it to work with some wildcards.

The window title I'm trying to match will look like this:

SampleApp 1234 - some text here (12345678 - some more miscellaneous text)

I want to match only windows that start with 'SampleApp #### - ', and then can have any text, and then have ' (########' followed by any other text.

The 4-digit grouping and the the 8-digit grouping can be made up of any digits, and the the length of 'some text here' and 'some more miscellaneous text' may vary.

[REGEXPTITLE:(?i)SampleApp \d\d\d\d - *] matches my sample title but it only checks the beginning of the title, which isn't enough.

How can I get it to also check that there's a ' (########' string later on in the title?

[REGEXPTITLE:(?i)SampleApp \d\d\d\d - * \(\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d*] does not work and my test title isn't matched at all. In fact, if I use the * character in the pattern followed by anything after it, I get no matches.

What basic bit of RegExp magic am I missing?

Edited 20 hours ago by TimRude

[TimRude]

Nevermind, I just figured it out. I had to add a . before the first *

This works:

[REGEXPTITLE:(?i)SampleApp \d\d\d\d - .* \(\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d*]

Not sure exactly why the . is needed before the * but it works. If anyone cares to explain why .* works when * doesn't, I'm all ears.

Edited 20 hours ago by TimRude

[Musashi]

1 hour ago, TimRude said:

Not sure exactly why the . is needed before the * but it works. If anyone cares to explain why .* works when * doesn't, I'm all ears.

.* is required because :
.  -> matches any single character except, by default, a newline sequence.
* -> 0 or more, greedy

* alone is a Quantifier (or repetition specifier) which specifies how many of the preceding characters are expected to match. 

Info : \d\d\d\d can be written as \d{4}

Global $sStr     = "SampleApp 1234 - some text here 12345678 - some more miscellaneous text"
Global $sPattern = "(?i)SampleApp \d{4} -.*\d{8} -.*"
ConsoleWrite(StringRegExp($sStr, $sPattern) & @LF) ; Returns 1 (match) or 0 (no match)

 

Edited 19 hours ago by Musashi
typo

[pixelsearch]

It's because the quantifiers (* + ? { }) "specify how many of the preceding character, class, reference or group are expected to match." ( @jchd in help file, topic StringRegExp)

So space* will check for 0 or more repeated spaces, while .* will check for 0 or more any character (except newline characters when the option (?s) is not indicated)

Edit : @Musashi was fast

Edited 18 hours ago by pixelsearch