RegExp object help

[motte]

I ran across a problem this weekend working with the regexp object. Since I do most of my programming in perl, reg expressions are not new to me. But ASP gave me some problems.

I had a string...actually a path on my drive...
example:
e:\mike.com\templates\foo.asp
This became my string:

I was looking for a pattern in the string:
pattern="e:\mike.com\templates\"

I wanted to replace that pattern with nothing, so I could get foo.asp.

I was getting some error when trying to use .replace...

I had something like this:
*****************************************
dim re, string
set re=new regexp
string="e:\mike.com\templates\foo.asp"
re.pattern="e:\mike.com\templates\"
if re.test(string) then
re.replace(string, "&quot
end if
*****************************************

I was getting some error that said the parenthesis shouldn't be used for replace...So I got rid of them, though all documentation told me to have them. Then I tried without the (). It said replace was not a valid method, or something like that. Does anyone know what the deal was?

I actually decided to go a different way and create a filesystemobject to grab the file's name. But I don't understand why the pattern replace didn't work. I am using IE 6.0 now.

I'd love to hear if anyone knows the deal behind this.

Mike

 

[SauerC]

trying using call re.replace(string, "&quot

 

[motte]

sauerc,

Actually, now looking at it and trying it out, I know what I did wrong. My pattern "e:\mike.com\templates\" is flawed. The backslashes and dot need to be escaped so they actually represent backslashes and dots...pattern should be "e:\\mike\.com\\templates\\"...i forgot since i thought i was dealing with just a string. with this set up, it works like a charm. Thanks for your advice though. fyi, using 'call' would work but when i want to reveal the end result, it fails since i didn't set the result to anything:

call re.replace(string,"&quot 'will not change string.
string=call re.replace(string,"&quot 'this would change string but does not work since you can't set a variable to a 'call'.

in order to work, it'd have to be this way.
string=re.replace(string,"&quot

Now I know.

Mike