Let us look together on data
<a
id="toc-ch1
" href="@@@.html#ch1">
to evaluate by Perl regular expression find string
id="(toc-chapter
|toc-ch|toc-part
|toc-pt
|toc-
)
The Perl regular expression search finds first
id=" and starts now the evaluation of the OR expression (in a capturing group, non capturing group would be a little bit faster here).
The first 6 characters of
toc-chapter match with the data in the line, but 7th character is not matching. So the first argument of the OR expression does not result in a positive match.
The Perl regular expression find function traces back to character after
id=" and evaluates now the second argument
toc-ch which indeed results in a 100% match. So second argument of OR expression is positive and as there is no more criteria for a positive match of entire search string after the OR expression, the task is done with finding
id="toc-ch which is selected and caret is blinking after this string in the file.
The next regular expression find should match everything from current position in file to
" which is in this case just the character 1. So the script does what you coded, but what you don't want.
Here is an improved code for your task to get the string of interest into a string variable. It uses a lookbehind and a lookahead to match just
intro,
ack and
ch1 in right context, i.e. with
id="toc- before and
" as next character.
Code: Select all
UltraEdit.perlReOn();
UltraEdit.activeDocument.findReplace.matchCase=true;
UltraEdit.activeDocument.findReplace.regExp=true;
UltraEdit.activeDocument.findReplace.searchDown=true;
UltraEdit.activeDocument.findReplace.preserveCase=false;
UltraEdit.activeDocument.findReplace.find('(?<=id="toc-).+?(?=")');
var nSec = UltraEdit.activeDocument.selection;
Some more hints:
In JavaScript a string can be defined either with "..." or with '...'. In a string defined with "..." a double quote which should be part of the string must be escaped with a backslash, but a single quote can be specified without a backslash. In a string defined with '...' a literal to interpret single quote must be escaped with a backslash, but a double quote can be specified without a backslash. For strings containing double quotes it is therefore much better to define the string with single quotes.
The line
var nSec = UltraEdit.activeDocument.copy(UltraEdit.clipboardContent); is nonsense in your code.
The function
UltraEdit.activeDocument.copy() does not take any parameter. This function copies always the selected text in active document to active clipboard. So
UltraEdit.clipboardContent is completely ignored. The value returned to variable
nSec is the boolean value
true which does not mean that the copy was successful. The returned value is always
true even if nothing was copied as nothing selected in active file. The property
UltraEdit.clipboardContent (string member variable of UltraEdit object/class) has no effect here at all.
To copy a string to active clipboard and assign the clipboard content later to a string variable the could would be:
Code: Select all
UltraEdit.activeDocument.copy();
var sClipboardText = UltraEdit.clipboardContent;
The variable name
nSec looks like based on my naming convention, but used wrong. The prefix
n means in my naming convention that the variable
Sec holds a number (integer value), but in code above it holds a string and should be named
sSec according to my naming convention. See
this post if you are interested in my simple naming convention used for JavaScript which you can but must not use for your JavaScript code.
