Group string

Function Syntax

string [int, int] group_string(string group_me ,string group_by )

• group_me is the string to split into groups
• group_by is the regular expression to group by

This function finds all (non-overlapping) matches of the regular expression group_by within the string group_me. A 2-dimensional array of matching strings is returned. The first index is the number of the match, starting with 0 for the first match. The second index is the number of the group within each match, with exactly the same meaning as the 2nd parameter to group(): element 0 is the entire text matched by the regular expression, element 1 is the text matched by the first set of grouping parentheses within the expression, element 2 is the second set of grouping parentheses, and so on.

Code Sample

In this example, the regex tries to match a number followed by a space followed by a word. The number and the word are placed into groups.

string input = "134 Muscle 97 Mysticality 102 Moxie";
string [int,int] test = group_string( input, "(\\d+) (\\w+)" );
foreach i,j in test
	print("test[" + i + "][" + j + "] = " + test[i][j]);

The first match was "134 Muscle", the first group was "134" and the second group was "Muscle". The resulting output is:

> call test.ash

test[0][0] = 134 Muscle
test[0][1] = 134
test[0][2] = Muscle
test[1][0] = 97 Mysticality
test[1][1] = 97
test[1][2] = Mysticality
test[2][0] = 102 Moxie
test[2][1] = 102
test[2][2] = Moxie

group_string exists for convenience purposes, it doesn't extend ash's capabilities any more so than what is already possible with create_matcher, the following is functionality equivalent, albeit uglier:

string input = "134 Muscle 97 Mysticality 102 Moxie";
string [int,int] test;
//populate the long way
	matcher m=create_matcher("(\\d+) (\\w+)",input);
	int i=0;
	while(m.find())
	{
		for x from 0 to m.group_count()
		{
			test[i][x]=m.group(x);
		}
		i+=1;
	}
foreach i,j in test
	print("test[" + i + "][" + j + "] = " + test[i][j]);

The output is the same as before. To better understand what's going on, try removing the parenthesis from the regular expression

string input = "134 Muscle 97 Mysticality 102 Moxie";
string [int,int] test = group_string( input, "\\d+ \\w+" );
foreach i,j in test
	print("test[" + i + "][" + j + "] = " + test[i][j]);

The resulting output is:

> call test.ash

test[0][0] = 134 Muscle
test[1][0] = 97 Mysticality
test[2][0] = 102 Moxie

As you can see, all group_string does is loop the regular expression populating a map with the group results along the way. The first int is the loop index while the second int is the group index with index 0 representing the full match exactly how group works.

More Information

Please refer to Regular Expressions for general tips. See this thread for details on this function.