Regular expressions must be greedy?
emdalton - July 29, 2009 - 14:56
| Project: | Search and Replace Scanner |
| Version: | 6.x-1.0 |
| Component: | User interface |
| Category: | support request |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | active |
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Description
I'd like to get rid of some old server-side includes code in my nodes. So I want to use a search like this:
<!--.+?-->
There are some pages in which if I don't add that final "?" to make the search "lazy," I'll end up deleting real content that needs to stay in the page. But when I try to use this search in Regular Expressions mode, I get this error:
* user warning: Got error 'repetition-operator operand invalid' from regexp query: SELECT t.body as content, t.nid, n.title FROM node_revisions t INNER JOIN node n ON t.vid = n.vid WHERE n.type = 'curriculum_page' AND t.body REGEXP '<!--.+?-->' in /usr/local/web/lamp/users/wsbe/site/sites/all/modules/scanner/scanner.module on line 801.
* user warning: Got error 'repetition-operator operand invalid' from regexp query: SELECT t.body as content, t.nid, n.title FROM node_revisions t INNER JOIN node n ON t.vid = n.vid WHERE n.type = 'page' AND t.body REGEXP '<!--.+?-->' in /usr/local/web/lamp/users/wsbe/site/sites/all/modules/scanner/scanner.module on line 801.No matches are found, though I get 64 returns if I leave out the "?" and let the regexp be greedy. Any suggestions?
#1
Workaround: I searched on
<!--[^<>]+-->instead. But if scanner doesn't support lazy matching, probably this should be documented.#2
Thanks for the heads up and the workaround. I'll look into this to see if lazy matching is truly disallowed, or if there's some change I can make to the code to get this working.