string.match and regex in Lua, is it possible?

I'm currently working on a script gathering information from a website. I'm wondering if string.matc开发者_JAVA百科h would be able to accept regex pattern matching, such as the following:

string.match(page, "(?:(Phrase One|Phrase Two|Phrase Three|...))")

The problem is, I don't know if it can be done, but I'm willing to try any solutions. Thanks!

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You can use the Lrexlib if you need full blown regular expressions.

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What you could do is to define a function which takes your patterns as a table and then returns a table of matches, or if you only need to know if the text is contained in the page then following would work.

    function FindAny(strContent,tblPatterns)
    bReturn = false
    for i,strPattern in ipairs(tblPatterns) do
        if (string.find(strContent,strPattern) ~= nil) then
            bReturn = true
            break
        end
    end
    return bReturn
end
if FindAny('pattern 4',{'pattern 1','pattern 2','pattern 3','pattern 4'}) then
    print('Pattern Found')
end

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Lua doesn't come with regular expressions built-in but there are a couple add-on modules for that. Here's one: http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/re.html

That said, gmatch() can be used for the problem you describe, it's just a different syntax than regular expressions. Here are explanations:

http://lua-users.org/wiki/StringLibraryTutorial

http://www.wowpedia.org/Pattern_matching

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As far as http://lua-users.org/wiki/StringLibraryTutorial indicates in the gsub method.