regexp

Section: Tcl Built-In Commands (n)
Updated: 8.3
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NAME

regexp - Match a regular expression against a string

SYNOPSIS

regexp ?switches? exp string ?matchVar? ?subMatchVar subMatchVar ...?

DESCRIPTION

Determines whether the regular expression exp matches part or all of string and returns 1 if it does, 0 if it does not, unless -inline is specified (see below). (Regular expression matching is described in the re_syntax reference page.)

If additional arguments are specified after string then they are treated as the names of variables in which to return information about which part(s) of string matched exp. MatchVar will be set to the range of string that matched all of exp. The first subMatchVar will contain the characters in string that matched the leftmost parenthesized subexpression within exp, the next subMatchVar will contain the characters that matched the next parenthesized subexpression to the right in exp, and so on.

If the initial arguments to regexp start with - then they are treated as switches. The following switches are currently supported:

-about

Instead of attempting to match the regular expression, returns a list containing information about the regular expression. The first element of the list is a subexpression count. The second element is a list of property names that describe various attributes of the regular expression. This switch is primarily intended for debugging purposes.

-expanded

Enables use of the expanded regular expression syntax where whitespace and comments are ignored. This is the same as specifying the (?x) embedded option (see the re_syntax manual page).

-indices

Changes what is stored in the matchVar and subMatchVars. Instead of storing the matching characters from string, each variable will contain a list of two decimal strings giving the indices in string of the first and last characters in the matching range of characters.

-line

Enables newline-sensitive matching. By default, newline is a completely ordinary character with no special meaning. With this flag, ``[^'' bracket expressions and ``.'' never match newline, ``^'' matches an empty string after any newline in addition to its normal function, and ``$'' matches an empty string before any newline in addition to its normal function. This flag is equivalent to specifying both -linestop and -lineanchor, or the (?n) embedded option (see the re_syntax manual page).

-linestop

Changes the behavior of ``[^'' bracket expressions and ``.'' so that they stop at newlines. This is the same as specifying the (?p) embedded option (see the re_syntax manual page).

-lineanchor

Changes the behavior of ``^'' and ``$'' (the ``anchors'') so they match the beginning and end of a line respectively. This is the same as specifying the (?w) embedded option (see the re_syntax manual page).

-nocase

Causes upper-case characters in string to be treated as lower case during the matching process.

-all

Causes the regular expression to be matched as many times as possible in the string, returning the total number of matches found. If this is specified with match variables, they will contain information for the last match only.

-inline

Causes the command to return, as a list, the data that would otherwise be placed in match variables. When using -inline, match variables may not be specified. If used with -all, the list will be concatenated at each iteration, such that a flat list is always returned. For each match iteration, the command will append the overall match data, plus one element for each subexpression in the regular expression. Examples are:


regexp -inline -- {\w(\w)} " inlined "
      → in n
regexp -all -inline -- {\w(\w)} " inlined "
      → in n li i ne e

-start index

Specifies a character index offset into the string to start matching the regular expression at. The index value is interpreted in the same manner as the index argument to string index. When using this switch, ``^'' will not match the beginning of the line, and \A will still match the start of the string at index. If -indices is specified, the indices will be indexed starting from the absolute beginning of the input string. index will be constrained to the bounds of the input string.

--

Marks the end of switches. The argument following this one will be treated as exp even if it starts with a -.

If there are more subMatchVars than parenthesized subexpressions within exp, or if a particular subexpression in exp does not match the string (e.g. because it was in a portion of the expression that was not matched), then the corresponding subMatchVar will be set to ``-1 -1'' if -indices has been specified or to an empty string otherwise.

EXAMPLES

Find the first occurrence of a word starting with foo in a string that is not actually an instance of foobar, and get the letters following it up to the end of the word into a variable:


regexp {\mfoo(?!bar\M)(\w*)} $string -> restOfWord

Note that the whole matched substring has been placed in the variable ``->'', which is a name chosen to look nice given that we are not actually interested in its contents.

Find the index of the word badger (in any case) within a string and store that in the variable location:


regexp -indices {(?i)\mbadger\M} $string location

This could also be written as a basic regular expression (as opposed to using the default syntax of advanced regular expressions) match by prefixing the expression with a suitable flag:


regexp -indices {(?ib)\<badger\>} $string location

This counts the number of octal digits in a string:


regexp -all {[0-7]} $string

This lists all words (consisting of all sequences of non-whitespace characters) in a string, and is useful as a more powerful version of the split command:


regexp -all -inline {\S+} $string

KEYWORDS

match, parsing, pattern, regular expression, splitting, string