Question

I’m trying to learn how to use regexps in lua but I see no results, so I’m asking for help.

I got two types of url:

1) /a/b/c/d/some,text,commas,and,so,on,FILE.dat 
2) /a/b/c/d/FILE.dat

I need to do two things:

1. get substring with filename: FILE.dat
2. get substring with path: /a/b/c/d/FILE.dat

I have written regex which retrieves me a filename from a first case:

string.match(url, ".*,(.*)")

similar regex retrives me a filename from second case:

string.match(url, ".*/(.*)")

Now can You tell me, how to merge this two regexs into one?

Answer 1

If those two cases are your only ones, matching for the filename is easy starting from the back:

filename=string.match(url,'([%w_]+%.%w%w%w)$')

For tossing out the comma separated part I’d resort to something like

filepath=string.gsub(url,'%w+,', '')