Regular Expressions

[FrancoisL]

I have submitted Enhancement Request #0000003904 asking for Regex Support in ABL. I would love to be able to use Regex directly in ABL.

Some info about Regex:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

If you have any interest in seeing this feature and have a account there , please vote for it or give some feeback. Any support for this is appreciated .

 

[Casper]

I would love to have it too.
There is a project from marianne edu, I believe, which lets you directly call from php regexp functions from Progress. If you want to check it out I can try to find the link...

Casper.

 

[FrancoisL]

Sure would love to get a look at it.

 

[Casper]

Well, took some time to find it again, but I meant this project: http://www.geocities.com/ncsoft/progress/epp.htm

Casper.

 

[tamhas]

Did you check for existing requests? I'd be surprised if this wasn't there since it is an old request.

 

[FrancoisL]

We now have Regex in 10.2 using the .Net part.

Here a example:

USING System.Text.RegularExpressions.*.



DEF VAR mcol AS CLASS System.Text.RegularExpressions.Match.

mcol = Regex:Match("Heelloo","He(e)?l").

MESSAGE mcol:Value VIEW-AS ALERT-BOX.


Guess this kills any chance of seeing it natively. Now we have to start upgrading all our end-user to 10.2A .

 

[TomBascom]

You can call libc (and other shared libs) from UNIX too.

But that shouldn't kill desire, or the business case, to have a native feature.

 

[miroc]

Tom, would be much more useful if you post actual working example instead of small comments.

 

[medu]

Just saw my name being referenced and thought to straight things up and give the credit where credit is due... the Progress to PHP call interface belongs to Mark Newnham, you can find his site here http://webspace.webring.com/people/tm/mnewnham/

Personally if I will need regexp in Progress I would use one of the ansi c libraries available, http://slre.sourceforge.net/ looks like a valid candidate although it's using structures and might require some code adaption but it should not be difficult to get it done, if anyone interested I might do this

 

[TomBascom]

Tom, would be much more useful if you post actual working example instead of small comments.

There is working sample code for calling the UNIX regex library here: http://dbappraise.com/ppt/shlib.pptx

 

[sdjensen]

There is working sample code for calling the UNIX regex library here: http://dbappraise.com/ppt/shlib.pptx

Thanks for the Powerpoint!

 

[TomBascom]

My pleasure