Finding the first string that matches a pattern in Lua (XML pattern matching)
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14-11-2019 - |
Question
I'm currently using the following code to parse a part of an Xml file (I first read the entire file into a single string).
for xmlMatch in xmlString:gmatch("<MyXmlElement.*</MyXmlElement>") do
-- Do something.
end
The problem I have is that the for loop is only executing once because the the gmatch function is returning only a single string, which starts at the first instance of MyXmlElement and ends at the closure of the last instance of MyXmlElement. How can I parse the string so as the the pattern is matched whenever the string "</MyXmlElement>"
is first found (and not the last case only)?
Solution
There are 3 things wrong here:
- gmatch returns the captured substrings from the string, so you need to use () around stuff you want to use in the loop
- for matching the least possible number of characters you should use
.-
as pattern to go just until the first possible</MyXmlElement>
- and you need variables after the for (but I guess that's just a typo)
So all together:
for att,cont in XmlString:gmatch'<MyXmlElement%s*(.-)>(.-)</MyXmlElement>' do
-- something
end
should do the trick.
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