Match regular expression sub matches should return offset and length

[StephenB]

Match regular expression will return sub matches for any groups in your expression. So this expression: (\w+)_(\w+) would be sub match 1 and 2.

However, LabVIEW only returns the string of the sub match, not its offset and length. This makes doing replacements on sub matches difficult and technically impossible because you then have to do a search and replace on the sub match and hope there isn't an identical string somewhere in the full string (causing an incorrect replace).

Other languages deal with this easily by addressing sub matches by slash codes. For example the first sub match is \1 and the second is \2. So you can say... search for this and replace \1 with that.

So I propose:

[Darin.K]

If you go to this example you will see how you can use some "hidden" functionality in vi.lib to get this job done.

https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-13698

[StephenB]

Darin that is great. Thank you! I can use both of those then to get offset and length of each sub match.

However I still wish this was just on the xnode instead of hidden VIs that require more work to use.

Your regex helper is very impressive. I will use this.

Another idea for sure... but I wish Perl RegEx supported variable length look behinds...

[Darin.K]

> However I still wish this was just on the xnode instead of hidden VIs that require more work to use.

I am a bit concerned about mile-high nodes if this was always there, but I can imagine an alternate configuration which returns the submatches as three arrays:  strings, offsets, lengths.

[Darren]

Any idea that has received less than 5 kudos within 5 years after posting will be automatically declined.