I find it highly annoying that this, as far as I understand, really doesn't use regular expressions.
The s/that/this/ syntax is not, of course, a regular expression. The regular expression is the thing that might go into the "that" part, an expression that can match against several different inputs. If all it supports is literals, it's not really worth calling it a regular expression, in my opinion.
The article expresses this like so:
Some experimentation shows that it isn't a full regular expression engine, it will only do straight word substitution.
I think this is stretching it; sure all literal strings are regular expressions, but if that's all there is (i.e. no alteration, repeat etc), then why call it an RE at all?
Oh, no argument there, though being "highly annoyed" may point to some grumpiness.
It is clearly not a regex engine, but it operates like a very very naive one, and uses the Perl syntax for them.
Ultimately Regex just seemed like the easiest / clearest way of describing the functionality. IE, if I say "Skype supports the Perl Regex syntax for simple word substitution" you probably instantly think of s/a/b/.
Maybe I should have used that as the headline, but it seemed a bit long.
I probably would have said "It supports sed-like substitution" (or maybe even s/sed-like/vim-like/). Generally speaking, regular expressions denotes finding something while this does more than that. Regardless, this level of pedantry shouldn't come as a surprise on HN (I admit to being guilty of it myself).
I think that's a bit grumpy. It's fair to call this "regex," not because it's exactly a regular expression matcher, but because it clearly borrows its syntax from a popular regular expression engine (one that's traditionally used for simple word replace in chat windows). Similarly, most people use the term "regex" to refer to the full engines in most programming languages, which are often much more powerful than actual regular expression matchers (e.g. back references).
I also noticed recently that, in a somewhat shell-like way, you can press the up arrow to edit your previous message at will (but perhaps this is common knowledge).
As a suggestion, you could search the line for the substring with the least Levenshtein distance from the correction, to use as the text to replace—and thus also support the "*word" correction syntax I see quite more often from non-technical friends. :)
I believe (though am likely wrong) that the *correction format originated in IRC, where you can't edit text once you've sent it... though I now see s/wrd/word/ quite often too - but that's mainly in technical rooms.
In a group chat, I seem to be able to edit my previous messages OK - even if someone has replied already and if I've written something else since then.
You can type in "/help" in a chat to see more options:
sys: Available commands:
/me [text]
/add [skypename+]
/alertson [text]
/alertsoff
/whois [skypename]
/help
For more help please see http://www.skype.com/go/help.chathelp
When I first found this feature, I tried to write an email to Skype to thank them for including it. Sadly, there is no way to do such a thing. I looked all over their website for a contact email address, and I finally found one on a hard-to-find page, but when I wrote my message to it, I just got an auto-reply saying basically “please don’t send email to us. Call us or open a support ticket.” Opening a support ticket just to say “thank you” didn’t seem right. It’s sad that the company provides a way for people to complain about the program not working, but not for people to thank the makers of the program. (And I don’t think it’s because thank yous are useless to the company – knowing what your customers like is valuable feedback.)
It’s an easter egg in that there is no documentation for the feature, and it is one that only people who are “in on the joke” (use IRC) would look for. The feature being functional doesn’t prevent it from being an easter egg.
I've always wanted to implement this in my IRC client, but been too lazy, it's nice to see it implemented in some form of chat client, although it's a bit lacking. Is the change visible for all participants?
The main theme for a Mac based IRC client has this feature built in. Though it only reflects for people that have that client/theme. If you are wondering the client, it is Linkinus.
I believe the change is visible in Skype for all participants.
You do not need to type in /s/blah/anotherblah, it is already enough that you just hit the 'Up'-key on your keyboard. You then can edit previously written text!!!
It is really interesting that nobody points this out ;)
At the cost of mental cycles of your recipient reader to parse what just happened, which come in much less available quantity than network bytes or CPU cycles.
The s/that/this/ syntax is not, of course, a regular expression. The regular expression is the thing that might go into the "that" part, an expression that can match against several different inputs. If all it supports is literals, it's not really worth calling it a regular expression, in my opinion.
The article expresses this like so:
Some experimentation shows that it isn't a full regular expression engine, it will only do straight word substitution.
I think this is stretching it; sure all literal strings are regular expressions, but if that's all there is (i.e. no alteration, repeat etc), then why call it an RE at all?
Am I just being grumpy?