Pattern Matching
Many of the op* and ch* commands allow patterns to specify multiple objects or channels. These patterns allow wild cards which will match all or parts of strings.
-
*- Match any sequence of characters -
?- Match any single character -
^- Do not match. -
[alphaset]- Match any alphabetic characters enclosed in the square brackets. In Touch, the[a-g]format is not currently supported, the characters must be listed as[abcdefg]. -
[num1-num2]or[num1-num2:increment]- Match any integer numbers enclosed in the number range, with the optional increment. -
@groupname- Expands all the items in the group. Since each group belongs to a network, you can specify a path before the@groupnameidentifier.
NOTE: The opposite of pattern matching is Pattern Expansion, takes a short string and generates a longer string from it.
Pattern matching is also often used to match channel names. It uses the following kinds of patterns to select existing channels in an input CHOP, used in CHOPs like the Select CHOP and the Math CHOP's Scope parameter, where you only want to affect certain channels and leave the reset as-is.
Examples
chan2
|
Matches a single channel name |
chan3 tx ty tz
|
Matches four channel names, separated by spaces |
chan*
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Matches each channel that starts with "chan" and ends with anything
|
*foot*
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Matches each channel that has "foot" in it, with anything or nothing before or after
|
t?
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The ? matches a single character. t? matches two-character channels starting with t, like the translate channels tx, ty and tz
|
r[xyz]
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Matches channels rx, ry and rz. that is, "r" followed by any character between the [ ]
|
blend[3-7:2]
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Matches number ranges giving blend3, blend5, and blend7. (3 to 7 in steps of 2)
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blend[2-3,5,13]
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Matches channels blend2, blend3, blend5, blend13
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t[uvwxyz]
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[uvwxyz] matches characters between u and z, giving channels tu, tv, tw, tx, ty and tz
|
Using Pattern Matching in Commands
opcd/obj ; opls -d @geo
This example lists all the objects in the group named "geo".
opcd /obj/geo1 ; chadd @xform_sops tx ty tz
This example adds channels (tx, ty and tz) to all the SOPs contained in the xform_sops group.
opcd /mat ; opls /obj/@lights
This example shows how to reference groups outside of the current folder.
