Question

The first pattern in SearchPatternCookbook shows how to extract values from a table. Clearly, this is useful to pull values from a form field values definition.

I'm trying to do that but also to extract the tooltip information too. And, try as I might, I cannot get the tooltip info to show up from a $pattern() ... that third field just seems to want to be ignored and with several tried patterns I get the text of the $pattern rather than any result.

Even if I try to greedily match the whole row, my recollection is I just get the pattern.

I think I was unsuccessful in getting the "option" text to output, as well.

Environment

-- MatthewKoundakjian - 05 Jul 2007

Answer

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Here is a the same search as the example but with the tooltip also outputted:

%SEARCH{ "^\|[^\|]*\| *option *\|" topic="%TOPIC%" type="regex" multiple="on" nosearch="on" nototal="on" format="Name: $pattern(^\| *(.*?) *\|.*), tooltip: $pattern(\|[^\|]*\|[^\|]*\| *(.*?) *\|.*)<BR>" }%

About getting the $pattern instead of the matched text: this happens when you use a gready dot (.*). This is some kind of bug or limitation of $pattern, which is also mentioned in TWiki.FormattedSearch. It makes writing patterns a bit harder..

-- JosKunnekes - 06 Jul 2007

Jos ... what do you do instead?

-- MatthewKoundakjian - 06 Jul 2007

You can use almost anything instead. Consider this search:

%SEARCH{ "^\|[^\|]*\| *option *\|" topic="%TOPIC%" type="regex" multiple="on" nosearch="on" nototal="on" format="Name: $pattern(^\| *(.*) *\|[^\|]*\|.*)<BR />" }%

The result:

It doesn't work, but prints the pattern instead, because it contains a greedy dot:

$pattern(^\| *(.*) *\|[^\|]*\|.*)

Now if we replace (.*) by

• (.*?)
• ([^\|]*)
• ([\w\W]*)
• or (.?.+)

respectively, of which the last two have almost the same meaning, it does work:

%SEARCH{ "^\|[^\|]*\| *option *\|" topic="%TOPIC%" type="regex" multiple="on" nosearch="on" nototal="on" format="Name: $pattern(^\| *(.*?) *\|[^\|]*\|.*)<BR />" }%

Name: One
Name: Two
Name: Three

%SEARCH{ "^\|[^\|]*\| *option *\|" topic="%TOPIC%" type="regex" multiple="on" nosearch="on" nototal="on" format="Name: $pattern(^\| *([^\|]*) *\|[^\|]*\|.*)<BR />" }% 

Name: One
Name: Two
Name: Three

%SEARCH{ "^\|[^\|]*\| *option *\|" topic="%TOPIC%" type="regex" multiple="on" nosearch="on" nototal="on" format="Name: $pattern(^\| *([\w\W]*) *\|[^\|]*\|.*)<BR />" }%

Name: One | option
Name: Two | option
Name: Three | option

%SEARCH{ "^\|[^\|]*\| *option *\|" topic="%TOPIC%" type="regex" multiple="on" nosearch="on" nototal="on" format="Name: $pattern(^\| *(.?.+) *\|[^\|]*\|.*)<BR />" }%

Name: One | option
Name: Two | option
Name: Three | option

So I guess you can basically use anything as long as you keep .* out of the regex (except at the end). Even this ((?:.+)?) or this (.{0,}) does the trick

-- JosKunnekes - 07 Jul 2007

Jos, you rock.... I wasn't trying to get the first field, but a third field ... but your examples were adaptable. I'm going to use:

%SEARCH{ "^\|[^\|]*\| *option *\|" topic="%TOPIC%" type="regex" multiple="on" nosearch="on" nototal="on" format="Name: $pattern(^\|[^\|]*\|[^\|]*\| *(.?.+) *\|.*)<BR />" }%

-- MatthewKoundakjian - 08 Jul 2007

Here's the final version of what I was after....

%SEARCH{ "^\|[^\|]+\| *option *\|[^\|]+\|" topic="Category" type="regex" multiple="on" nosearch="on" nototal="on" format="---++ [[%SCRIPTURL{"view"}%/%WEB%/Category?category=$pattern(^\| *(.*?) *\|.*)][$pattern(^\| *(.*?) *\|.*)]] %BR%$pattern(^\|[^\|]*\|[^\|]*\| *(.?.+) *\|.*)%BR%" }%

-- MatthewKoundakjian - 08 Jul 2007