Esoteric Update #285 - Ugh My Head, Anyway, Coding

I've not had a good week. I've spent several days at the doctor's, and it seems I might be sick again right now. Because of the rather rough condition I've been in for the last week, I focused on clearing a few backlog items. I'll try to return to working on the adventure as soon as my health allows me.

I've worked on three different avenues, more or less in parallel. So, going in no particular order...

Firstly, I looked at the filter code. Initially, I started by clarifying a few inconsistent behaviours with the \< and \> wildcards. But I felt drawn to tackle an issue I've been thinking about for a long time. In the end, I implemented multiple new wildcard symbols. These additions include number matching (\$), case insensitive matching (\=x - matches both x and X), a match which can be customised to match several different symbols (\[\$ab] - will match any number, a or b), and much the same, but being able to match symbols until encountering one that does not fit with the given set (\@[\$.eE-] - should match properly formed numbers). However, the issue also falls on the other side of the pattern - on the transduction output, which now features a failsafe preventing rules from being matched if the output cannot be constructed, and its version of the multiple-match, which will, in turn, add elements from the wildcard queue as long as they match the provided set of symbols.

Secondly, I wanted to tap further into the capabilities of C#'s Regex implementation. Using it just for matching is a shame when it can do much more. After some documentation perusing, I managed to put together something that, I believe, covers most interesting use cases, allowing for a data source to be saved in a variable and then queried.

Thirdly, I spent a lot of time extending the Index with important information while unifying and enhancing the presentation. As it turns out, we weren't using some stylistic conventions consistently, and as such, some Index entries had a different formatting. I've added a lot of UI element previews to the entries, improved cases where the UI entries already existed in the text, and so on. I think there are a few crucial bits of information there that were previously missing. In particular, an introduction to magic, explaining the general rules of using it in the setting.

Overall, while I didn't get to work on the adventure, I think I did get a fair bit of work done despite the head-splitting migraine I've been experiencing for the last week. The changes to filter and regex offer me an avenue to return to some previously abandoned ideas. I will most definitely be revisiting the existing filter files at some point in the near future, but it's not just about that. A rather important aspect of the changes to filter involves its usage with HTML elements. But maybe that's best to be left for a time when I have some examples to show.

There's also some other (positive, for a change) stuff happening in the background, but I'm hesitant to talk about it yet.