regexp question.

Hobbes

Trying to figure out what this is supposed to be doing (I don't have the input text for it ).

This is what is searching for.

"(?i)\\b" + value + "\\b"

utopian

Hobbes wrote:

Trying to figure out what this is supposed to be doing (I don't have the input text for it ).

This is what is searching for.

"(?i)\\b" + value + "\\b"

This should match \bvalue\b case-insensitively.

The (?i) turns on the case-insensitive modifer, and the \\ is an escaped \.

Hobbes

As far as I Could see the \b means backspace?

I had a problem with some code and traced it to that regexp. Oddly enough as soon as I remarked out that line everything worked fine.

utopian

Hobbes wrote:

As far as I Could see the \b means backspace?

I had a problem with some code and traced it to that regexp. Oddly enough as soon as I remarked out that line everything worked fine.

Or a word boundary i.e. the writer wants to match "value" on its own (not valued etc.).

However, the \\b escapes the backslash, so evaluates to the literal '\b'. I presume this is not what the writer intended.

Having said that, in some languages, you may need to use \\b to have \b sent to the regexp parser. In python, you get around this by using raw strings e.g. re.compile(r'\bvalue\b') is equivalent to re.compile("\\bvalue\\b").

Edit: lots more on word boundaries