Re: [IUG] Regular expression help

["Jackson, Richard" <rjackson at huntington dot org>]

Bob,

I think your interpretation of "..[^(je)]." is correct.  Maybe this is
one of those things that works in some other implementation of regular
expressions, but not in Create Lists.  I agree that John Boggs'
suggestion using two AND'ed statements should work perfectly.

Negative matching -- which can get much hairier than this example --
would be so much easier if we had available a "does not match" condition
or, for that matter, a simple Boolean NOT operator.

Richard V. Jackson 
Head of Copy Cataloging / Database Manager 
Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens 
1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108 
rjackson at huntington dot org / 626-405-2100 x2384

-----Original Message-----
From: innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org
[mailto:innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org] On Behalf Of Bob Duncan
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 2:11 PM
To: IUG INNOPAC List
Subject: Re: [IUG] Regular expression help

At 03:38 PM 01/11/2008, Andrew wrote:
>Sorry, this should have been
>..[^(je)].


Negative matching makes my brain go a little fuzzier than usual, but 
I think that when you start putting values inside the square brackets 
to indicate a range of characters, all but the caret are literal 
values.  So in this regex you'd be saying that there's a pattern 
match when there's any single character, then any single character, 
then any single character that's not a j, an e, or an opening or 
closing parens, then any single character.  So while any location 
codes that have the string "je" in positions 3 and 4 of the code 
would definitely not match (which is desired), there's a pretty large 
universe of other strings that would also not match, which is NOT 
desired.  Examples: aajjb, aaejb, aaeeb, aajb, aaeb, (where a and b 
can be any character) and anything three characters or less.

Or am I fuzzier than I think?

I think John Boggs' suggestion of combining several expressions in 
create lists might be the only way to do something like this.  Seems 
vaguely reminiscent of the discussion about the area code search a 
couple of months (?) back.

Bob Duncan


~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~
Robert E. Duncan
Systems Librarian
Editor of IT Communications
Lafayette College
Easton, PA  18042
duncanr at lafayette dot edu
http://www.library.lafayette.edu/ 


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