Question

I’m having some trouble trying to develop a regular expression which will pick out all the function calls to “tr” from this block of asp code below. Specifically I need to get the string in each “tr” function call.

    if(RS.Fields("Audid").Value <> 0 ) Then
        Response.Write ("<td>" & tr("RA Assigned") & "</td>")
    else
        Response.Write ("<td>" & tr("Not Yet Assigned") & "</td>")
    End if

    if(RS.Fields("rStatus").Value = "Activated") then
        Response.Write("<td><A HRef='portal_setup_billingII.asp?OrderPId=" & RS.Fields("CustomerParid").Value & "&OrderId=" & RS.Fields("OrderId").Value & "'>" & tr("Edit") &"</A></td></TR>")
    Else
        If (gParLevelz_Admin = gParLevelz and RS.Fields("CustomerParid").Value <> 0) Then 
            Response.Write("<td><A HRef='portal_setup_billingII.asp?OrderPId=" & RS.Fields("CustomerParid").Value & "&OrderId=" & RS.Fields("OrderId").Value & "'>" & tr("Awaiting Authorization") & "</A></td></TR>")
        else                                       
            Response.Write("<td>" & tr("Awaiting Authorization") & "</td></TR>")
        End if
    End if

I believe I have a good first attempt at getting this done. The following expression extracts values for most of the cases I will run into…

tr\(\"([^%]|%[0-9]+)+\"\)

What’s causing me the most confusion and stress is how to capture all manner of strings which show up in the “tr” function. Literally anything could be between the quotation marks of the “tr” call and unfortunately my expression returns values past that last quotation. So given the above snippet which I have posted one of the matches is…

tr("RA Assigned %2") & "</td>")
            else
                Response.Write ("<td>" & tr("Not Yet Assigned %4") & "</td>")
            End if

            if(RS.Fields("rStatus").Value = "Activated") then
                Response.Write("<td><A HRef='portal_setup_billingII.asp?OrderPId=" & RS.Fields("CustomerParid").Value & "&OrderId=" & RS.Fields("OrderId").Value & "'>" & tr("Edit") &"</A></td></TR>")
            Else
                If (gParLevelz_Admin = gParLevelz and RS.Fields("CustomerParid").Value <> 0) Then 
                    Response.Write("<td><A HRef='portal_setup_billingII.asp?OrderPId=" & RS.Fields("CustomerParid").Value & "&OrderId=" & RS.Fields("OrderId").Value & "'>" & tr("Awaiting Authorization") & "</A></td></TR>")
                else                                       
                    Response.Write("<td>" & tr("Awaiting Authorization") & "</td></TR>")

Which is way more than I want. I just want tr("RA Assigned %2") to be returned.

Answer 1

It looks like your regex pattern is greedy. Try making it non-greedy by adding an ? after the 2nd +: tr\(\"([^%]|%[0-9]+)+?\"\)

A simplified version to capture anything inside the tr(…) would be: tr\(\"(.+?)\"\)