regular expressions in highlights and telnet control handling

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

I fixed some issues with telnet control handling which were borked. I also adjusted some things so that we show up more favorably on the Cryosphere mud client support table after talking with the maintainer of that table. I may look into adding some more features based on that table--like NAWS support. The existing problem is that for the textui, I can't seem to determine what the LINES/COLS numbers should be if you're running Lyntin over telnet/ssh. I'm tossing around adding hooks for telnet control negotiation and changing the MudEcho handling to use this hook instead. That'd open up the possibility of creating something like a wxPython ui which is completely xterm compliant. I have to toss this around a bit more. I also want to enable logging of incoming telnet control code sequences so I can see what's going on.

I finally added Sebastians patch for regular expressions in highlights, though I made some adjustments to account for the current codebase (the patch was from like 6 months ago or so) and also to use our regular expression syntax instead of a toggle on the Session.

It's slick! The regular expression implementation is also faster than my original string.find implementation. Doing something like this:

> #highlight red e
lyntin: highlight: {red} {e} added.
> #highlight green i
lyntin: highlight: {green} {i} added.
> #highlight blue a
lyntin: highlight: {blue} {a} added.

doesn't tax Lyntin as much as it did with the string.find method. I kind of wish I had done this a few months ago, but didn't really get around to putting in the time to figure out what needed to be done. I think I'm going to overhaul substitutes/gags in the same way next.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.