Include XRegExp unicode-categories.js client-side

JavadocMD

I need additional XRegExp addons for my plugin's client script (to support character categories like \pN). It appears NodeBB includes xregexp (core) and unicode-base by default; how can I add unicode-categories?

I've tried adding ../../public/vendor/xregexp/unicode/unicode-categories.js to my plugin's scripts as well as modules to no avail (my understanding of what modules is used for is a little fuzzy). In any case, I get "SyntaxError: Unknown Unicode token \pN" when the script runs.

\pL works fine, presumably because that's provided in unicode-base.

Thanks!

julian

How have you tried adding public/vendor/xregexp/unicode/unicode-categories.js to the plugin? You should be able to append it by adding the entry into the plugin's clientScripts array in plugin.json

PitaJ

Just to clarify, I believe Julian is talking about copying the script file into your plugin, and trying it that way.

julian

Oh, yeah that'd work. I'm not sure if you could link back via relative path to the script in core, though. Worth trying.

JavadocMD

No luck trying clientScripts (neither the base path as you have it, nor prefixed with "../.."). I don't see clientScripts in the docs... how is that different from scripts?

Copying the script into my plugin is an acceptable workaround, I suppose.

JavadocMD

Oh wait! Fixed it. It appears the issue was simply script initialization order. My plugin.json now has this:

"scripts": [
  "../../public/vendor/xregexp/unicode/unicode-categories.js",
  "public/main.js"
],

(Where main.js is my script that uses XRegExp.) And it works fine. The first time I tried this, the scripts were in reverse order. No need to copy the script into my plugin, though that did help me figure out the issue. Thanks for the suggestion!

julian

To date you're the only other person who needed XRegExp, so feel special I guess?

JavadocMD

Attempting to do Unicode-friendly text manipulation is the worst kind of special.

julian

Ha! Yeah I hear you. Every time I load up a regex library I feel like there ought to be a better way... luckily I'm at least semi-proficient at writing a regular expression, but don't ask me to make sense of one after a week's time LOL