Regular expressions for filename searches & file sorting

[Kilmatead]

i was never a fan of non-deterministic finite state machines either

Actually those things just make me giggle like a delusional child and curl up into a small ball of fear regarding the outside world and the possibility of intelligent life actually existing on this crazy planet in the first place.  Thus causing some of my more eremetically creative moments, ironically enough.

And upon further reflection, I misread FrizzleFry's example: [1-35] is 1 to 3 and 5, not the logically obvious 1-35.  Sorry about that - I'm blind as well as full of fuzzy logic (plus it was only 8 am when I read that first, so it takes a few hours for the hair-of-the-dog to kick in properly and make the world a better place).

[nikos]

i need a regular expression to match exactly 8 hex digits

[0-9a-fA-F]*

is not it!

but this is it:

[0-9a-fA-F]{8}

case closed

[Thracx]

[0-9a-fA-F]{8}

goooooooo nikos!  Seeing you use RegExps brings a tear to my eye

[nikos]

if we had capability of regexp file (mass) renaming, would we need the existing $-tokens or things would be enough with the regexp syntax?

[narayan]

tokens are still needed for the non-technical people...

[nikos]

tokens won't go away but the question is whether they are needed within regular expressions or not

[FrizzleFry]

REs would take care of search & replace type mass renaming but you still need the tokens for the type of mass renaming we have now... counters, quickly adding suffixes or prefixes. Search & replace also needs two terms or fields... what to search for (the RE) and what to replace it with.

[narayan]

Token or not, the RegEx should be able to manipulate the following:

1. File properties (e.g. value of any column; including path, extension, basename, etc).
2. Item's position in the active/inactive pane