Text comparison: Support for Regular Expression Flags

Flag support for regex?? Huh?..

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/12_Using_Regular_Expressions_10.html
http://gskinner.com/RegExr/ : UI also has this with some nice help text.

Everything is possible! ..but what an unfortunate terminology.
I guess these could be checkbox options, similar to RegExr.

Follow-up once we add this here: #1658092: Action: Regular Expression

This would be immensely helpful for states like California, whose tax codes are insane... I would use it for ignoring the case on City names that are used to calculate taxes. As it stands now, I need to write separate rules for EVERY case permutation on 24 counties.

Hi. Is there any movement on this feature request (i.e. implementing regex flags)? The original post was made in June 2012, and this is a much needed enhancement.

The following issue posts are all related to the need for this feature (and this is only a sample):

• Can't get textual comparison to work
• Condition : "Text contains any word in a list"
• regex bug automatically escapes \ characters
• Warning when using regex
• Regex ignores i operator (case insensitivity)

While this feature should be properly implemented via the plugin (and checkboxes as the original poster suggested), if you desperately need the flags, and don't mind having them applied to all of your Rules regex, you could use the following hack in rules/modules/data.eval.inc:

function rules_data_text_comparison($text, $text2, $op = 'contains') {
  switch ($op) {
    case 'contains':
      return strpos($text, $text2) !== FALSE;
    case 'starts':
      return strpos($text, $text2) === 0;
    case 'ends':
     return strrpos($text, $text2) === (strlen($text) - strlen($text2));
    case 'regex':
//     return (bool) preg_match('/'. str_replace('/', '\\/', $text2) .'/', $text);
$matches = array();
     return (bool) preg_match_all('/'. str_replace('/', '\\/', $text2) .'/mi', $text, $matches);
  }
}

NOTE: the global (g) modifier does not exist, instead preg_match_all must be used, and a third parameter array must be passed.

Still in need of a patch here ...
Also need a test case.

We're not really adding new features this late in the D7 development cycle. Because there has been no community contribution for this feature in the form of a patch and/or test I'm moving this to D8 for consideration.

If you're interested in seeing this feature in Rules, please contribute a patch so we can review and discuss it.

Here is a quick patch that allows you to write regex the old way or the new (custom) way which includes flags.

is_countable() is only available for PHP 7.3.0+, but Drupal 8 is still supposed to run with PHP 7.0, and even PHP 5.5 for some currently-supported versions of core.

There also needs to be new tests with this patch to test that flags work. Testing just one flag would be sufficient.

Ah yes, I've added a test for the case-insensitive flag.

@TR, #14 and #15 share the same name, but I accidentally uploaded the wrong version on #14. That's why it isn't tested.

I don't like the use of function_exists('is_countable') - that should be used only if there is absolutely no other way possible.

Note there are also a few easy-to-fix coding standards issues in the patch. See the test results for details.

@TR do you think that the latest patch is good?