[hyperb0le]

I am working on a small learning project. I am currently implementing syntax highlighting that requires a wildcard to be used. For instance, to highlight an <img tag, the code would look for <img + * + >, where * is a wildcard. Is this possible?

[larkost]

You are really unclear in what you want, so I am going to have to do a lot of guessing... Here is what I think you are doing:

You have a NSTextView (Rich Text Enabled) that you want to syntax-hilight. You have gotten the NSMutableAttributedString from the appropriate NSTextStorage object and you would like to find the NSRange of an <img> tag. Do I have things so far?

If so, then you are barking up the wrong tree to try and do this with regular expressions (a wild-card is a regexp concept). You need to create a state machine, or use one of the many html state machines out there.

If you really feel that regexp is the way you need to go, then take a look at OmniGroup's OFRegularExpression in OmniFoundation.

[Brass]

Take a look at the NSString methods called something like "rangeOfString..."

Also, the NSScanner class is very good for finding substrings, and identifying their range. It's probably the easiest way to do this sort of thing.