Re: lpeg pattern repetition

[Nick Gammon <nick@...>]

Another thing I can't get to work is something simple like this:

I want to match on "Nick says hello" where "Nick" can vary. That is,  
in regular expression syntax:

.* says hello

I tried to do this in LPeg like so:

print (lpeg.match (lpeg.P (1)^0 * " says hello",
      "Nick says hello"))  --> nil

I am guessing that the lpeg.P (1) is so greedy it is consuming the "  
says hello" part as well. But if that is the case, how can that sort  
of thing be easily expressed? Another example would be:

.* says .*

That would be useful for general decoding of conversations. <someone>  
says <something>


The only way I can get my first example to work is by specifying the  
character set for the name, like this:

print (lpeg.match (lpeg.R ("AZ", "az")^0 * " says hello",
       "Nick says hello")) --> 16

That works, but only because I have excluded a space.

If I wanted to match on "Nick the programmer says hello",  then I need  
a space in the matching set, and then it consumes " says hello" as well.

By way of comparison, this works:

print (string.match ("Nick says hello", ".* says hello"))  --> Nick  
says hello


Thanks for any helpful suggestions you can make. :)

- Nick Gammon