XYplorer Beta Club

I think regex handlers analog to the copy handlers feature is a bad idea.

How can we use regex in a script if we'll have no way of knowing which engine will be used?
Sharing patterns here will now need to have caveats - "only works with PCRE handler".


I'm all for improving XY's regex engine, but I don't think it should be something user configurable.

TheQwerty wrote:I'm all for improving XY's regex engine, but I don't think it should be something user configurable.

Agreed. It should just be close to PCRE as possible, in my opinion.

+1 -- Jan Goyvaerts' RegEx library would be awesome as it combines the most prominent functionalities of many RegEx flavours into one system. It's compatible to most known RegEx flavours (Namely PCRE, Java, should be VB, too, I think...) just missing some special abilities some engines provide ( Matching-Bracket-Detection as available in... was it .net? )

Oh, BTW:
As far as I was told (by Jan Goyvaerts in some of his documentations, I think):

PCRE: Perl Compatible RegEx Engine

Marco wrote:
I love this idea. If it proves to be possible and doable, then we could write a petition to the "Regex Guy" (Jan Goyvaerts - http://www.just-great-software.com/ ) and ask him to write an external regex module hookable into XY. I'd gladly pay for that.

Oh, now you have me salivating. But that being said, he's always stayed away from putting his algorithms in libraries. He has, to my knowledge, been very strict about only using them in his own products.

Mesh wrote:

Marco wrote:
I love this idea. If it proves to be possible and doable, then we could write a petition to the "Regex Guy" (Jan Goyvaerts - http://www.just-great-software.com/ ) and ask him to write an external regex module hookable into XY. I'd gladly pay for that.

Oh, now you have me salivating. But that being said, he's always stayed away from putting his algorithms in libraries. He has, to my knowledge, been very strict about only using them in his own products.

But it would be beyond awesome if we could get him to do it... Or if we could get him to give us permission to add his algorithms to XY (i.e. licensing)...

XYplorer would become so cooooooool...

Hey, Don,

yesterday night before going to sleep I had an idea how this might work out with Jan if neither of you two is too pig-headed to see the benefit of it.

Ok, we are quite certain that Jan will neither give his RegEx code for free nor offer licensing for money. I think he already stated he isn't interested in either one...

BUT... How about a exchange of code?

You get his RegEx code and give him permission to use your scripting engine code...

As far as I remember (having quite a bunch of JG-Tools) Jan doesn't have any kind of scripting, which is quite sad because - at least PowerGREP - would be able to get to a whole new level if searched text could be manipulated with a script before it gets replaced.

Giving an example we just had here in our forum one or two weeks ago:
Converting roman and arabic numbers to the other version. The skript to do that is present here in our forum - put together by necrox (I think? Sorry if I remember it wrong...) - in just a couple of hours.

PowerGREP can't do that - or anything similar - right now. Would be awesome if it could, but some form of scripting would be required to do it...


Now... WHY would this possibly work?

Easy. You and Jan do have a bunch of things in common:

Both of you program tools (or a tool) on your own... You are both basically one person following his own instincts to program "perfect" tools. Jan already named his business after that philosophy ("Just Great Software").
Both of you are consequently working to perfection your software (ok, obviously you do push updates more often, but Jan is working on 7 tools, you "only" have XYplorer).

I really do think you both could get a nice leap for your software if you two could get this to work.

XYplorer would get a nice RegEx Engine and PowerGREP (and EditPad Pro and possibly AceText) could get a Scripting Engine.


I really hope this could work out...

PERL-compatible regular expressions

The "regex search and replace" feature would work much better for power users with a PCRE tool that:
1. Has a separate search and replace input field, not ">" to separate them.
2. Accepts buffer commands like replacing V(\d\d\d)\.WAV with VA\1.WAV
3. Has option check boxes, like match case and global replace.
4. Supports Unicode, like \N{U+2716}.


Victor Kovacs

[note: merged]