Question

I need a little kickstart on regex on the iphone.
Basically I have a list of dates in a private MediaWiki in the form of
*185 BC: SOME EVENT HERE
*2001: SOME OTHER EVENT MUCH LATER

I now want to parse that into an Object that has a NSDate property and a -say- NSString property.
I have this so far: (rawContentString contains the mediawiki syntax of the page)

NSString* regexString =@"\\*( *[0-9]{1,}.*): (.*)";
NSRegularExpressionOptions options = NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive;
NSError* error = NULL;

NSRegularExpression* regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:regexString options:options error:&error];
if (error) {
    NSLog(@"%@", [error description]);
}

NSArray* results = [regex matchesInString:rawContentString options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [rawContentString length])];
for (NSTextCheckingResult* result in results) {

    NSString* resultString = [rawContentString substringWithRange:result.range];
    NSLog(@"%@",resultString);
}

unfortunately I think the regex is not working the way I hope and I dont know how to capture the matched date and text.
Any help would be great.
BTW: there is not by any chance a regex Pattern compilation for MediaWiki Syntax out there somewhere ?

Thanks in advance
Heiko
*

Answer 1

As for the regex, i think something around these lines:

\*([ 0-9]{1,}.*):(.*)

should work better to what you need. You’re not escaping the first *, and why is there a * in the first group statement?