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scott8933
scott8933
Inspiring
September 9, 2020
Question

Bug in RegEx used in expressions?

  • September 9, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 395 views

Hi all,

 

Looking through the forums for some regex info, I'm seeing a lot of references to bugs in the Extendscript engine - incuding some crash-causing ones. Is there a known set of Donts with regex, anything specific to ES used in an expression?

 

I'm trying to track down a bug in a pretty extensive expression, noticed that I had a regex with a formatting issue causing it to not work as expected.

 

The bug I'm seeing is random enough to be very hard to trace (once a week, then suddenly 5 times in an hour!) and its an instant crash in AE, same problem in both windows and mac. No warning, no dialog box. The expression is basically parsing a big block of text and dynamically returning keywords so there's a fair share of regex matches inside.

 

Would be great to know any known issues with ae/es/expressions regex so I could at least cross -those- functions off the list.

 

Thank you!

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
September 9, 2020

Without seeing your code and understanding how and where it's used this is utterly pointless. I'm not even clear what you are actually referring to, as you're throwing around and mixing scripts and expressions, which are two completely separate things. You need to explain much better and be a lot more specific, also including system info, details about the amount of text, fonts used, how the text is read and whatnot. From encoding issues to simply hitting some internal limit to "bad" fonts there is a million things that could be at play here.

 

Mylenium

scott8933
scott8933Author
Inspiring
September 9, 2020

No, I'm extremely clear here that this is an expression. Nowhere do I mention Scripts.

 

The question is simply this: are there known risks with using regex in an expression? The forums have several threads that mention bugs with the extendscript engine and regex, but I can't find anything specific to After Effects.

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
September 9, 2020

ExtendScript has nothing to do with AE's internal expression engine, so there simply is no relation. Again, if you want answers, you need to be specific and explain all the details. No point playing hush-hush and being secretive about it or asking for generics thast even we here on this forum haven't encountered in all the years we work here. The simple truth of the matter is that we  can't know what you're working on and how it may affect AE's internal processing. There's just too much going on and the error must not even be in the expression engine itself.

 

Mylenium

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