RE: Stumped on a string patterns example

[Rena <hyperhacker@...>]

On 2012-10-12 1:05 PM, "Jeff Smith" <spammealot1@live.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> Thanks for all the help guys, I went with the solution
>
>
> local stripped = input:gsub("[\\\"']+", "")
>
> I had almost come up with that myself, the mistake I made was with all the pesky escape triple blackslashes I hadnt got that quite correct
>
> Regards Geoff
>  
>  
>  
> > Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2012 17:10:37 +0200
> > From: dirk.laurie@gmail.com
> > To: lua-l@lists.lua.org
> > Subject: Re: Stumped on a string patterns example
>
> >
> > 2012/10/9 Jeff Smith <spammealot1@live.co.uk>:
> >
> > >
> > > I have a string that maybe in any of these forms. I will omit the outer Lua
> > > string speechmarks for clarity
> > >
> > > Fred
> > > "Fred"
> > > 'Fred'
> > > \"Fred\"
> > > \'Fred\'
> > >
> > > I need to strip any speechmark and backslash characters and just return the
> > > string Fred as a Lua string. The name inside the speechmarks could have
> > > spaces or numbers in it just to complicate things a bit
> > >
> >
> > pat="(%p*)([%w ]*)(%p*)"
> > start, name, stop = str:match(pat)
> > if start~=stop then error "mismatched delimiters" end
> >
> > This will of course also allow *Fred* etc. Is that a problem?
> >

I think backslashes aren't escaped in long strings, so sometimes it might be easier to write something like [[\"]]. But then the ugly brackets might make it just as bad... :p