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I'm converting my forum to phpBB and they use similar BBCode tag but one is different. To quote in the old forum, it was formatted like:

old: [quote=prattw]My text here.[/quote]

new: [quote="prattw"]My text here.[/quote]

I need a regex that will add the quotes around the username in the BBCode block. Many thanks!

prattw
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  • I think you're reinventing the wheel. Is there a tool to automatically migrate your forum to phpBB? – Li-aung Yip Mar 16 '12 at 01:53
  • I've not been able to find a converter from WebWiz 9.x to phpBB. The best I was able to find was one that converted WebWiz 5 or 6 to phpBB 2. After spending over a week trying to get it it working I found out the converter was junk anyway. Even if it did work, I'd still have to upgrade again to get to 3. For the size of the forum it would have taken over a week to fully convert. I can't have the kind of downtime. My hand version is 90% done is just fine tuning now. – prattw Mar 16 '12 at 01:58

1 Answers1

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Assuming that the only valid characters for usernames are those matched by \w, i.e. [a-zA-Z0-9_] (in Python), then you can replace \[quote=(\w+)\] by \[quote="\1"\].

Caveats:

  • if your usernames are permitted to contain [] this may go horribly wrong.

    • You might be tempted to try a non-greedy any-character match like \[quote=(.+?)\], but for [quote=Clan[FROZEN] Supahkillah] this would give the match Clan[Froze.
    • The greedy version is even worse. \[quote=(.+)\] would match too much of [quote=Alice][quote=Bob].

    Remember that regexps aren't good at handling nested structures. You may want to use a parsing approach instead of a regular expression approach. (For HTML, this would be "use an XML parser" - for this example it will be "use a bbCode parser".)

  • At least in Python, the meaning of \w is locale-dependent. So for Russians, \w would match things like Главное в новостях too.

I still think you're trying to reinvent the wheel. Chances are that a script exists to automatically convert your old forum format to phpBB - you just have to look for it.

Community
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Li-aung Yip
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  • Thank you very much! The usernames are all normal alphanumeric English only names so this should work great. – prattw Mar 16 '12 at 02:11
  • As a sanity check, you probably want to dump all of your usernames to a text file (`SELECT username FROM users`?) and check that the **only** characters are `[a-zA-Z0-9_]`. Spaces and dashes would be common (i.e. my username here). – Li-aung Yip Mar 16 '12 at 02:13
  • On second thoughts, instead of `\w` it may be better to use the negated character class `[^\[\]]` which will match anything BUT `[` and `]`. Then it should be safe to use a greedy match. – Li-aung Yip Mar 16 '12 at 02:14