preg_Module version 1.1

The Component provides 14 routines which add similar functionality to 4D as the "Perl Compatible Regular Expressions" available in PHP. It requires the free plugin QFree 2.x from Escape Information Services to provide the regular expression support in 4D. The 14 routines provided in the component are simply wrappers for the QFree commands which allow some functions to be used more easily and with less coding on the part of the developer.

This version adds some new features as well as providing some additional examples in the sample database, e.g. importing CSV data, importing HTML tables, validating email address, etc.

The Component is provided Open Source with the database used to generate it as well as the component itself. All that we ask that if you contribute to the component, you send your changes to us, so that they can potentially be added into the main copy for others to get the benefits of your contributions also.

Only 4D methods are contained in the component. The Workshop dialog shown above is included in the sample database and can be easily installed into another application if needed. Some developers feel unhappy about including anything other than code in components and in this case, only the code is really needed. There is also an additional 4D plug-in which contains one plug-in routine and some required constants. This is provided for all platforms, i.e. Mac, Carbon and Win32, and is also open source.

Why not just use QFree directly?

The is no reason not to use QFree directly, but for certain operations, having the functions wrapped in this way has been beneficial. QFree gives you greater flexibility about how you perform regular expression operations and which results you return, but often we just need to do a simple match or extraction and have the results in a text array.

One problem with using this component is that you need to use process or interprocess arrays to return the results in, whereas if you use QFree directly, the results can be returned into local arrays, although you still need to extract the contents of the matches yourself. Those developers who use BASh from Deep Sky Technology won't have this problem because they can use DSS to create pointers to global arrays at runtime. The DSS module is also available seperately in the freeware section of the 4D Zine website.

Download

Complete Download (Source, Component, Plugins)
	preg_DB_Mac.sit.bin	MacBinary	232k
	preg_DB_Mac.sit.hqx	BinHex	320k
	preg_DB_PC.zip	ZIP	396k

All Variables Are Typed

Like all mitchenall.com 4D source code products, this component compiles with the "All Variables Are Typed" option on 4D Compiler. This is important to us, not so much for the slight time savings in compilation times, but so that we know exactly how the compiler will interpret our variables, no matter who compiles the database and with whatever settings.

QuickCodePro v4 Users

Users of Aparajita's QuickCodePro will be pleased to know that this module has all the parameter lists in the comments page for each individual method. This means you can use the QuickCommand feature just as you do for 4D commands. The comments also contain brief help on each command so that you can use the HotHelp feature to display a bubble with the important information about a routine.