Lua pattern matching

[Caellian]

Hi,

I've been trying to remove the server name from players in chat, or even replace it, for example, from PlayerX - ServerY to playerX (*)

Actually, i need to do this is the chat but also in another addon (bars that display the player's name)

Example (wrong of course): local test3 = string.gsub(unit, "%-.+", " (*)")


Thing is, i su** at this. Could anyone tell me how to do both situation (remove or replace with (*) please ?tell me how to do both situation (remove or replace with (*) please ?

[SDPhantom]

Actually, that should work. Sometimes they add spaces around the hyphen, which can be removed too.

name:gsub("%s*%-.*"," (*)");

[Ketho]

I'm not really helping, but maybe an useful resource --in this link they discussed on just removing the server name from Combat Log names, instead of replacing it with an *

http://forums.wowace.com/showthread.php?t=19477#9

[Caellian]

Originally Posted by SDPhantom Actually, that should work. Sometimes they add spaces around the hyphen, which can be removed too. name:gsub("%s*%-.*"," (*)");

The space, yep, good catch, thanks, and yeah btw, my example worked... lol

[Tim]

I'm pretty noob at the whole pattern matching thing as well. Is there a way to remove duplicate letters in a string using pattern matching?

start: Neaaakkoooooooooo
finish: Neako

msg:gsub(msg, "[^a-zA-Z]+", "")

I have this so far to basically remove anything that's not a standard letter.

[SDPhantom]

Lua doesn't have a strong pattern matching system like Perl, PHP, etc. You'll have to do a separate check like "[Aa][Aa]+" would match 2 or more A's.