Regex problem

[philw]

Hi,

I'm trying to get a regular expression to match or not match depending on whether there is a punctuation character at the end of a line. For example:

A line of text. (ends in a punctuation character)

A line of text (doesn't)

\A *.*[[:punct:]]+ *\Z matches the first line but not the second (which is what I hoped would happen). However

\A *.*[[^:punct:]] *\Z doesn't match either.

Any one know what I'm doing wrong here?

Thanks!

[zorphnog]

Try taking out your \A and \Z:

.+[[:punct:]]

[zorphnog]

Nevermind. [:punct:] is printing characters (whitespace), NOT punctuation characters! So maybe something like:

(?m)^.+[\.\?!]{1}\s*$

[philw]

I really need the \A and \Z left in, but I'll try and adapt your suggestions accordingly. Thanks very much for your help.

Edited August 6, 2009 by philw

[GEOSoft]

Post 4 or 5 lines of the text and tell us what you need returned. [:punct:] IS puntuation. One of your problems could be the [[^:punct:]]. without your text I won't be checking it but it's probably [^[:punct:]]

[zorphnog]

Oh. I totally misread you're original post. You just have the ^ in the wrong place.

\A *.*[^[:punct:]]+ *\Z

[philw]

Moving the ^ outside the square bracket works - thanks for that! I only put it inside because the StringRegExp documentation says:

[^:class:] Match any character not in the class, but only if the first character.

Which is kind of confusing!