On Wednesday 27 July 2011 07:45, Caveat wrote: > But if you were to make a commercial product that looked through some > data, picked out the email addresses (whether it uses regular > expressions or not to achieve that is irrelevant), high-lighted them and > allowed the user to perform some action on them... you *could* (in the > eyes of Apple's lawyers) be infringing on their patent and get pursued > legally through the courts.
The very first Unix "mail" program did exactly this -- parsing the plain- text mbox file to find a pattern indicating the start of a message, listing the messages for the user and allowing the user to select one -- and predates Apple's patent by about two decades. That they were given it is sad, but if they were to try to enforce it against someone with enough money to make it worth their while, it's likely they would lose the patent. They have many others which are more dangerous, but not as easily used to subvert a technical discussion into a political one. As for the original topic, the way I used to implement a regexp that returned a list of results back in my Gambas days was to write a function to repeatedly execute the pattern against subsets of the subject string, advancing the offset after each successful match. I wrote the gb.pcre component, and if I wrote a mass-match feature in, I've forgotten it. The only lists it returned were lists of submatches, as in if you searched for /the (q\S+) (b\S+) (f\S+)/ it would return a list containing the entire match, "quick", "brown" and "fox". Rob ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Got Input? Slashdot Needs You. Take our quick survey online. Come on, we don't ask for help often. Plus, you'll get a chance to win $100 to spend on ThinkGeek. http://p.sf.net/sfu/slashdot-survey _______________________________________________ Gambas-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gambas-user
