The objective of this Regex (\w*)\s*\([(\w*),]*\) is to get a function name and its arguments.
For example, given f1 (11,22,33)
the Regex should capture four elements:
f1
11
22
33
What's wrong with this regex?
2 Answers
You can do it with split Here is an example in javascript
var ar = str.match(/\((.*?)\)/);
if (ar) {
var result = ar[0].split(",");
}
Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13953005/1827594
1 Comment
ps0604
Thanks, your answer got me closer, see regex101.com/r/pX0nQ6/7
Some things are hard for regexes :-)
As the commenters above are saying, '*' can be too lax. It means zero or more. So foo(,,) also matches. Not so good.
(\w+)\s*\((\w+)(?:,\s*(\w+)\s*)*\)
That is closer to what you want I think. Let's break that down.
\w+ <-- The function name, has to have at least one character
\s* <-- zero or more whitespace
\( <-- parens to start the function call
(\w+) <-- at least one parameter
(?:) <-- this means not to save the matches
,\s* <-- a comma with optional space
(\w+) <-- another parameter
\s* <-- followed by optional space
This is the result from Python:
>>> m = re.match(r'(\w+)\s*\((\w+)(?:,\s*(\w+)\s*)*\)', "foo(a,b,c)")
>>> m.groups()
('foo', 'a', 'c')
But, what about something like this:
foo(a,b,c
d,e,f)
?? Yeah, it gets hard fast with regexes and you move on to richer parsing tools.
4 Comments
ps0604
there's a problem with your regex, see regex101.com/r/pX0nQ6/5
Sean Perry
Yeah, the joys of trying to answer a question before heading home.
ps0604
you can eliminate any new lines and extra spaces before you run the regex
Sean Perry
Sometimes. Depends on syntax, comments, etc. If they embed comments after each parameter than just collapsing the newlines will not work.
(\w*)would indicate even zero-length sequences (of whitespace). And the last argument for the function here requires to be followed by a comma; you may need to add a separate group for the last argument.[]. Also, don't use regex for this\w(a special character) does work.