Re: How to coerce a string pattern to an ordinary pattern?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg124394] Re: How to coerce a string pattern to an ordinary pattern?
- From: "Oleksandr Rasputinov" <oleksandr_rasputinov at hmamail.com>
- Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:00:33 -0500 (EST)
- Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com
- References: <jf3cbd$ni4$1@smc.vnet.net>
On Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:43:25 -0000, Andrew DeYoung
<adeyoung at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> How do I coerce a string pattern to an ordinary pattern? For example,
> I might want to select those elements of a list that are pairs of
> strings, where the first string matches the string pattern
> "["~~___~~"]".
>
> Thank you so much for your time.
>
> Andrew DeYoung
> Carnegie Mellon University
>
In general you can't, because string patterns and symbolic patterns are
fundamentally different. Instead you could, e.g., write a symbolic pattern
that takes this into account and matches string patterns where necessary
using StringMatchQ etc. For instance, a pattern that works for your
example is:
patt = {_String?(StringMatchQ[#, "[" ~~ ___ ~~ "]"] &), _String}
lst = {{1, "[a]"}, {"[b]", "2"}, {"[c]", 3}, {"[d]", "4"}, {"5", "[e]"}}
In :=
Cases[lst, patt]
Out =
{{"[b]", "2"}, {"[d]", "4"}}
Another possible approach would be to use ToString on the whole expression
and match exclusively using string patterns. However, I wouldn't
personally recommend this method, mainly because string patterns are less
flexible than symbolic ones.