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Regex Question

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 6:44 pm
by johnd
How does newLISP control the value of system variables in regex? It seems they are set only on non-nil regex results.

> (regex ".*([aeiou]{2}).*" "Seattle")
("Seattle" 0 7 "ea" 1 2)
> $1
"ea"
> (regex ".*([aeiou]{2}).*" "San Francisco")
nil
> $1
"ea"
>

If this is the intended behavior it should probably be documented. I would argue that nil is a result and that $1 should return nil when the regex evaluates to nil. This was an issue recently because I was checking for $1 to be nil rather than the regex expression itself. The regex evaluated to nil but $1 retained a previous value.

John
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Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 7:09 pm
by cormullion

Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 7:10 pm
by Jeff
I disagree. I've put that side effect to good use in progressive logic. You can set $0 yourself between regexes. And you should always check the return value :)