I need to be able to handle data that can look like:
set setting1 "bind button_x +actionslot1;bind button_y \" bind button_x +stance \" "
bind button_a jump
set setting2 1 1 0 1
toggle setting_3 " \"value 1\" \"value 2\" \"value 3\" "
These are what some of the commands for the console of a game look like, and I’m trying to write an emulator of sorts that will interpret the code the same way the game will.
The first thing that comes to mind is regex, but I’m not sure it’s the best option. For example, when matching for the value of a setting, I might trying something like /set [\w_]+ "?(.+)"?/, but the wildcard matches the ending quote because it’s not lazy, but if I make it lazy, it matches the quote inside the value. If I make it greedy and stop it from matching the quotes, it won’t match the escaped quotes in the values.
Even if there are possible regex solutions, they seem like the wrong option. I had asked before about how programs like Visual Studio and Notepad++ know which parentheses and curly braces matched, and I was told there was something similar to regex in some ways but much more powerful.
The only other thing I can think of is to go through the lines of code character by character and use booleans to determine that state of the current character.
What are my options here? What do game developers use to handle console commands?
edit: Here’s another possible command which strongly deters me from using regex:
set setting4 "bind button_a \" bind button_b "\" set setting1 0 \" " \" "
The commands include not just escaped quotes, but quotes of the manner "\" inside escaped quotes.
I would suggest you read about Lexical Analysis
, this is the process of tokenizing your text using a grammar.
I think it will help you with what you are trying to do.