Bug Stomp

a regular expression

Hmmm...I was hoping to see something using ? or .

These are pretty standard, but I haven't gotten them working correctly.

? is handy in some numerical contexts, but in a linguistic setting when what we primarily need to match are typos, gerunds, conjugations and occasional punctuation, what would a single character wildcard actually be useful for? I imagine it works, but I have never found the need to try it.

I tried using "?", with no success. Also, the "*" and "+" quantificators seem to behave both as "*".

Obviously, there is a syntactic problem about "." and "?". These quantificators are also punctuation symbols. In a true regex, you have to escape them in order to gain access to the punctuation symbol. Unescaped, they are read as quantificators. But in our keyphrases, a period is a period and so on. And you cannot enter punctuations.

I'm used to using it to make a specific string optional, as in (his|her)? Meaning zero or more occurances of that group.

Also, the "*" and "+" quantificators seem to behave both as "*".

Uh, no. * is a standard soft wildcard, and ([s]+) in a regex = any number of ss.

I think a lot of the problem here is that the regex system we're using is not a fully regex environment, it's a subset. The AIEngine processes all keyphrases using */(*) wildcards and local plugins as regexes, even without (re) - Basically it's in regex mode the whole time. When we specify "(re)" we get a sort of shell access to deeper regex functions, but it's not the whole regex environment - some functions are reserved by the AIEngine (including . I imagine.)

I really wish that the link to the regex system was working. I suppose no one has an electronic copy of it lying about?

I'm used to using it to make a specific string optional, as in (his|here)? Meaning zero or more occurances of that group.

Well, (his|here|) would do that, wouldn't it? "his", "here" or nothing...

Sure, I'm just used to thinking differently, I guess. I had just thought of that, and came to post about it.

>>Well, (his|her|) would do that, wouldn't it?
>>"his", "here" or nothing...
However, in both cases you run into the "key count" problem. I've burned repeatedly by doing things like
(do|) (you|) (verb)
only to discover that the Key# of (verb) is based on the number occupied keys, NOT its position in the KP. For example, "dance" is key3 of "do you dance" but key2 of "you dance."

M

the "key count" problem

Yeah, it can take a bit of getting used to - the answer is to have hierarchies of keyphrases:

(verb)
you (verb)
do you (verb)

though you can usually concatenate them:

(verb), you (verb), do you (verb)

just remember not to have any |) or * before keys you need to access.

Does the comma only work that way in regex, or is it a general or operator for the entire engine?