LiveCode Forums.

I'm trying to matchText for the end of sentences, something like "*/[.!?]/" or "*[\.\!\?]" but I can't find a pattern that to match the punctuation that Livecode likes. Any ideas?

Thanks.

I'm not sure if I entirely understand what you are trying to do, but I do see from the Documentation that the way matchText
is explained there is different from your examples:

matchText ["Goodbye","Get Lost"]

I could see no sign of those backslashes.

So, I wonder if you might be better with something like matchText [".","!","?"]

Hi,

matchtext can be used with regular expressions. From the dictionary

matchText("Goodbye","bye")
matchText("Goodbye","^Good")
matchText(phoneNumber,"([0-9]+)-([0-9]+-[0-9]+)",areaCode,phone)

But as of LC 7 their is a "Sentence" keyword, maybe that helps? Once you parse for sentences you could do the usual chunk operations on them.
Kind regards

Bernd

Yeah, I realize I didn't give enough information in my original post. A bit of frustration and lack of sleep, I guess.

I'm trying to return a boolean on a word, "true" if the word contains ".,?,!", which may, or may not be at the end of the word. So the pattern should be
"some amount of characters","a single sentence closing punctuation mark","maybe a quote, maybe not"

I think the main problem I'm having is that everything I need to match against is a special character. And, my attempts to "escape" them have only generated errors. In an online regular expression tester "*(\.|\?) selects all the "." marks on the page. But anything similar in livecode just tosses up a debugger. I feel that "*(\.|\?|\!)*" should match the words I'm trying to identify, but at this point, it's just a guessing game of unhelpful errors. I'm afraid that I don't understand this part well enough see where I'm going wrong. But that's why we try new things

thanks

Lucked into it. Some quote about monkeys and typewriters seems appropriate.

Here it is if anyone else has a similar problem. Returns true for sentence closing punctuation marks, including those inside quotes.