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in reply to Re^2: Function for reading file
in thread Function for reading file

Is your goal really to match every character in the ASCII character set except for 0-9 and _ (underscore)? I couldn't suggest a better alternative without knowing exactly what you want. However, again if you're only working with ASCII and not Unicode, these expressions do the same thing, in slightly different ways:

Of these options the second one is certainly the easiest to read. But my point in my previous post was that I'm doubtful this is exactly what you want. It seems very suspect to allow matching \t, \n, (, ), ^, -, A, B, z, ' '(space), ','(comma), and so on, but to disallow any numeric digit and the underscore. It doesn't seem like it's doing what you want it to be doing. But you didn't make clear to me what it is that you actually want to do.

Furthermore, if you are dealing with Unicode semantics, the number of characters that are matched by that pattern is enormous, and even weirder. If you suggested what you're trying to match we might be able to help come up with a more specific expression.


Dave