On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 5:57 PM, Eric Niebler <eric@boost-consulting.com> wrote:
Robert Dailey wrote:
Thank you very much for helping. I wouldn't go as far as to say it isn't hard, because that looks very hard IMHO. I was hoping for something a
little
more intuitive and built-in. Instead of going through all of that work I will probably first try to find a different third party regular expression library that can automate this task for me so that I can keep my code a little cleaner and focus on the actual task.
Hm, OK. Good luck. Maybe Boost.Regex has this feature.
I know that other regex libraries in other languages provide such a feature. Perhaps in the future Boost.Xpressive can be extended to provide this behavior. You could simply create a version of regex_replace() that takes a functor as the replacement instead of a string.
Nothing is simple. It would require careful design work, tests and docs. If you feel strongly about it (and it /would/ be useful), you can open a feature request on svn.boost.org. Or even better, submit a patch. This is open source, after all, and I welcome your participation.
-- Eric Niebler Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com
Hey Eric, I ended up using the method you proposed anyway mainly because I love boost so much and also because you did all of the work for me, so I couldn't let that go to waste. I barely had to make any changes anyhow. I realize it is open source but I really don't like modifying third party libraries unless I'm absolutely stuck with it. In other words, if I can get the original authors of the library to make the changes for me then I will wait for that instead of doing it myself. In addition, the boost library implementations intimidate me (they use a very complex design, structure, and syntax that takes a couple of minutes to follow). The boost implementations "think outside of the box", which is why it looks so exceedingly different from other implementations I've seen. It definitely requires a whole different state of mind. My whole point in saying all of this is that I'm not confident I can provide as worthy of a patch as someone who works on the boost library on a daily basis, but I will most certainly try. For the most part I would just be taking your source and making changes from there. In any case, I split up your source a little and placed them into more generic hpp files and I've put that into the engine for our game. You were very helpful, and I thank you. I'll submit a patch later on when I have time to mess with it. For future reference, where can I submit patches? Thanks again.