Regex Validator

System

A while ago, I had some people in DevNet help me construct a regex to use in an excludePattern for a deployment configuration that would exclude *.jhtml except index.jhtml. This was a difficult regex to create, but Rob Huffstedtler was persistent enough to figure it out. While the regex he created works in a perl script, it does not work within a deployment config. When I enter it into the regex validator on the Interwoven site (https://support.interwoven.com/tools/scripts/regex/RegexValidator.asp), it claims it's a malformed regex, but that's all the info I get. It would be nice if the tool reported which part of the regex it thinks is malformed. Since the deployment doesn't barf, I assume it thinks the regex is ok. My suggestion is, can the regex validator be made more useful by reporting more information when a regex is found to be malformed? And why would a regex work in perl (using iwperl that's shipped with TeamSite) and then be considered malformed by the validator?

Here's the regex:

(^|.*\/)(i(?!ndex(?=\.)).*|[^i\/][^\/]*)\.jhtml$

Here's the snippet of perl code I used to test this:

#!/interwoven/iw-home/iw-perl/bin/iwperl

my @str = ("/doc/index.jhtml","index.jhtml","indx.jhtml","index.html","foo.jhtml","doc/Templates/foo.jhtml",
"./doc/Templates/index.jhtml");

foreach (@str) {
if (/(^|.*\/)(i(?!ndex(?=\.)).*|[^i\/][^\/]*)\.jhtml/) {
print "$_ is excluded\n";
}
else {
print "$_ is NOT excluded\n";
}

}

exit;


Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Edited by Smitty77 on 10/21/02 10:28 AM (server time).

Adam Stoller

The regex validator would appear to have been written to test validation-regex strings for TeamSite Templating - which uses Regex(5) Extended parsing and not PerlRE parsing. In this case, it looks like the (? is what is causing the malformed error message to appear.

The regex support used within OpenDeploy for filters is supplied by a Java class (I don't remember which one right now) that conforms [more] to PerlRE - though I don't recall if it handles the (? syntax either.

On the positive side - I believe the next release of OpenDeploy will hopefully have an includePath and includePattern directive which should make it easier to do the kinds of things you indicated in your post.

See Todd Scallan's post in the OpenDeploy forum regading signing up for beta testing the next release (when available for doing so)


--fish
(Interwoven, Curriculum Development)