Re: Regex question

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

On 18-Aug-05, at 6:26 PM, Aaron Brown wrote:

> Keith Pimmel wrote:
>
> > I try anchoring it with the following
> >
> > _,_,last = string.find(str,'(^\n]*$)')
> >
> > which produces
> > nil
>
> Try this:
>
> _, _, last = string.find(str, '([^\n]*)$')
>
> Lua (for some reason) doesn't like anchors to be inside
> captures.

That will suffer from two problems:

First, if the string ends with \n, it will return an empty string, 
probably not what was desired.

Second, it will be much slower than you might like; the pattern will be 
attempted at every character position in the string.

If you knew that the string did not end with a \n, and that there was 
always at least two lines (or that the string did start with a \n), 
this would be quite a bit faster:

   string.find(str, '\n([^\n]+)$')

but I suspect that Shannon's for loop using string.gfind is actually 
the best solution.