Question

I am trying to find multiple matches within one topic using search.

MultipleSearchesInSameTopic discusses this, still it does not work for me.

example

I would like to extract the names of all contributors to this topic. I assume it starts with "Main" and would like to print the part after it.

in

%SEARCH{ "-- Main" topic="HowtoMultipleSearchesInSameTopic" multiple="on" scope="text" regex="on" nosearch="on" nototal="on" format="$pattern(.*Main(.*)) $n"}%

out

)

)

)

)

)

SearchDotPm

The code handles this via

                
   $tempVal =~ s/\$pattern\((.*?\s*\.\*)\)/getTextPattern( $text, $1 )/geos;

It is especially unclear to me how this is supposed to handle nested '(' ')'

Still it seems to work for the rest of the world. What am I doing wrong?

-- FrankHartmann - 08 Nov 2004

Environment

-- FrankHartmann - 08 Nov 2004

Answer

in

%SEARCH{ "-- \[*Main" format="$pattern(.*-- \[*(Main.[^ \]\n\r]+).*) $n" topic="HowtoMultipleSearchesInSameTopic" multiple="on" scope="text" regex="on" nosearch="on" nototal="on"}%

out

FrankHartmann

FrankHartmann

SamHasler

SamHasler

SamHasler

SamHasler

shake it all about

That's modified from the example FormattedSearch#Extract_some_text_from_a_topic_u

The documentation could perhaps do with some more verbose explanations for the examples to explain why they were written the way they are, and a troubleshooting sections of common problems with examples that don't work and how they should be written.

Let's also have a sig without a date because you probably want it to pick up those.

-- SamHasler

There are other common formats that this might not pick up.

• Does it pick up initials? -- SH - 08 Nov 2004
• Does it pick up initials, without a date? -- SH

yes it does

-- SamHasler - 08 Nov 2004

Sam, many thanks. I missed the documented limitation:

_Limitation: Do not use .*) inside the pattern, e.g. $pattern(.*foo(.*)bar.*) does not work, but $pattern(.*foo(.*?)bar.*) does _