Hubot regexes - stop at the first match, rather than trying all of them?

Question

I have a simple Hubot script that is looking for certain trigger words, then replying with a URL based on those trigger words.

A slightly contrived example:

robot.hear /CAT/i, (msg) ->
    msg.send "This is a URL - www.example.com/browse/cats"
robot.hear /YELLOWBIRD/i, (msg) ->
    msg.send "This is a URL - www.example.com/browse/yellowbirds"
robot.hear /BIRD/i, (msg) ->
    msg.send "This is a URL - www.example.com/browse/birds"

The problem is, one of the trigger words (BIRD) is a substring of another trigger word (YELLOWBIRD).

In this case, I want to only trigger on the more specific regex (YELLOWBIRD).

However, Hubot is currently triggering on both regexes - ie it will send in:

This is a URL - www.example.com/browse/yellowbirds
This is a URL - www.example.com/browse/birds

Is there a way to have Hubot treat the list of regexes like a case - as in, it will work through them from the top, and the first one it hits, it will break out, and not process the remaining ones? (Or maybe there's a way to make the "BIRD" regex ignore if if there's a yellow there).

And bonus question - is there perhaps a better or more idiomatic way of organising these regexes and replies? Some kind of lookup table or something?

Answer 1

Try this:

robot.hear /CAT/i, (msg) ->
    msg.send "This is a URL - www.example.com/browse/cats"
    msg.finish()
robot.hear /YELLOWBIRD/i, (msg) ->
    msg.send "This is a URL - www.example.com/browse/yellowbirds"
    msg.finish()
robot.hear /BIRD/i, (msg) ->
    msg.send "This is a URL - www.example.com/browse/birds"
    msg.finish()

Answer 2

You say that you're looking for words but your regexes are looking for strings . If you really do want to match words then you could toss some \\b s into your regexes:

\\b
Matches a zero-width word boundary, such as between a letter and a space.

so you could say:

robot.hear /\bCAT\b/i, (msg) -> ...
robot.hear /\bYELLOWBIRD\b/i, (msg) -> ...
robot.hear /\bBIRD\b/i, (msg) -> ...

so that your /\\bBIRD\\b/i will match 'big bird' but not 'angry yellowbird' or 'blackbird pie' .

If you still want to match 'blackbird' then you could just toss a simple conditional into the mix, something like this:

robot.hear /(\S*)bird/i, (msg) ->
  if((msg.match[1] || '').toLowerCase() !== 'yellow')
    # respond in here...

I don't have a Hubot setup that I can easily play with so that last one might not be quite right but hopefully it is close enough to illustrate the idea.