Flex Regular Expression Conversion Help

Question

I'm having a problem converting a regular expression from Python into Flex. My string is something like this:

SELECT "col", othercol,\n "othercol3" FROM doesn'tmatter...

Python matches just fine:

>>> re.search('select(.*?)from', 'SELECT "col", othercol,\n "othercol3" FROM doesn\'tmatter...', re.DOTALL|re.IGNORECASE).groups()[0]

' "col", othercol,\n "othercol3" '

But when I try it in Flex:

var pattern:RegExp = /select(.*?)from/ig;
var match:Array = pattern.exec('SELECT "col", othercol,\n "othercol3" FROM doesn\'tmatter...');
trace(match);

match always ends up null. What am I doing wrong? I'm sure it's obvious to a seasoned Flex programmer...

Answer 1

Try one of the many Flex regular expression testers out there:

http://www.idsklijnsma.nl/regexps/

For one thing, you're using dotall, etc., so you might want to know that Flex use the "s" flag for that. And the "x" flag ignores whitespace, etc. For example,

pattern:RegExp = /select.+?from/gis;

works for me on your example.