msys.pcre.match

msys.pcre.match — Perform a PCRE regex match operation

msys.pcre.match(subject, pattern);

Perform a PCRE regex match operation. Captures return their matches in numeric order and are referenced using the numeric index preceded by a dollar sign. The first capture is referenced using $1, the second using $2 and so on. Pass in the string to be matched and the PCRE regex pattern to match against.

This function returns three values:

matches, errstr, errnum = msys.pcre.match(subject, pattern);

The return values are as follows:

• matches nil if no matches were found, otherwise a table consisting of the following indices:

  • 0 complete matched portion of the string

  • 1 the first capture subexpression

  • 2 the second capture subexpression

  • ... additional capture subexpression

  If named captures, (?P....), were used in the pattern, then the names will be also be keys in the table, with their values set to the value of the appropriate subexpression.

• errstr if there was a failure during compilation of the regex, this string will contain the error message

• errnum this will contain a numeric representation of the error condition

Enable this function with the statement require('msys.pcre').

“Using Regular Expressions with the Policy Editor”, msys.pcre.split, msys.pcre.replace