Regex wildcard trouble

[David Kudler]

Hi. Time for what is probably another stupid question.

I've been loving 0.9.4 — the ability to work with ePub3 is great, and the whole app is running more smoothly for me.

Except that I went to do a wildcard Regex search today — something I've done thousands of times... and it didn't behave normally.

The search was

mybook\.to(.*)

Every time I do a search, it finds

mybook.to

But it won't find the rest of the URL. When I tried

mybook\.to(.+)

it selected ONE more character: the forward slash. But the rest of the URL remained unselected.

I've got all four of the check boxes selected, but I also tried turning each of them off to no avail.

I'm running Sigil 0.9.4 on a Mac that sports OS X 10.11.3. (It's a MacBook Pro mid-2012 with a 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7 and 8GB of RAM, if that matters, which I am sure it doesn't.) All of the various libraries are up to date — I made sure when I undated last week.

What am I doing wrong?

(FWIW, I'm replacing Amazon links with links to my website so that I can use the ebook on other vendor sites. There are 84 of them; I'd really rather not go through and change them one by one. But besides, I use regex all of the time, and if it isn't going to behave, I need to find another option.)

[theducks]

can you show a full example paragraph that contains mybook dot whatever

[David Kudler]

Originally Posted by theducks

can you show a full example paragraph that contains mybook dot whatever

Sure:

<p style="text-align: center;font-size:1.125em;">
<a href="http://mybook.to/thevisitorarrives" style="font-style: italic;">
<img alt="ThreeforThree-cover" height="120" src="../Images/Visitor-collection-1.5-cover-200.jpg" width="75"/></a> 
<a href="http://mybook.to/visitor-other-3somes" style="font-style: italic;">
<img alt="ThreeforThree-cover" height="120" src="../Images/the-visitor-and-other-3somes-cover-4-200.jpg" width="75"/></a> 
<a href="http://mybook.to/threeforthree" style="font-style: italic;">
<img alt="ThreeforThree-cover" height="120" src="../Images/ThreeforThree-take7-200.jpg" width="75"/></a>
</p>

That's a line of book covers linked (currently) to Amazon pages for the books.

Do you see anything there that might explain what's going on?

I just tried Calibre... and couldn't get it to stop being greedy. Eesh.

[theducks]

The slash is tripping you up and needs escaping

mybook.to\/(.+?)"

I find all the way to the FIRST quote by making the preceding wildcard non-greedy with a ?

[DiapDealer]

@OP: unchecking "Mimimal Match" allows both your expressions to work for me (the only box I have checked is "Wrap").

The only way I get your results (with your expressions) is if I check the "Minimal Match" box.

@theducks: his slash in his expression is being used to escape the "."

[theducks]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

@OP: unchecking "Mimimal Match" allows both your expressions to work for me (the only box I have checked is "Wrap").

The only way I get your results (with your expressions) is if I check the "Minimal Match" box.

@theducks: his slash in his expression is being used to escape the "."

I was referring to the one in his sample,which is right after the to(domain)

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by theducks

I was referring to the one in his sample,which is right after the to(domain)

Yes, but that wasn't part of his expression. The slash in his sample would have been matched by the (.+) or the (.*) in his expressions. My point was that his expressions, do exactly for me, what I'm assuming he wants them to do for him--as long as "Minimal Match" is unchecked. I'm not experiencing the same behavior he is with the exact same sample/expression/settings it seems.