Regular Expression support gone

[Eric Carlsen]

I've been enjoying this extension, mostly due to the fact that the "contains" criteria allowed me to enter regular expressions. Perhaps you know of another way, but that's how I split up my playlists that would be greater than 1000 items, by entering a regular expression on artist. However, all of the sudden all of my playlists that depend on that functionality are now empty. Was this capability removed? 

[Trevor Peck]

I don't use regular expressions for any of my playlists, and many of
mine went empty today (I noticed today, it could have been a little
earlier). I haven't had time to look into it.

- Trevor.

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[Simon Weber]

Whoops, this is my fault, haha. Here's what happened: the field originally explicitly mentioned it was a regex, I changed it to "contains" since most folks just used it to find plaintext substrings, and then I when I came back to it I thought it wasn't supposed to support regexes: https://github.com/simon-weber/Autoplaylists-for-Google-Music/issues/108.

I'll switch it back to existing playlists work again and then add a new field for non-regex substring querying.

On Friday, November 25, 2016 at 10:16:55 PM UTC-5, Trevor Peck wrote:

I don't use regular expressions for any of my playlists, and many of
mine went empty today (I noticed today, it could have been a little
earlier). I haven't had time to look into it.

 - Trevor.

[Eric Carlsen]

Thanks Simon. I'll admit I was pleasantly surprised to find regexes worked. Of course, I would prefer allowing playlists over length 1,000, but this was a decent alternative and I know that's a google issue. I actually dug through the code first to see if I could add them, which is where I found that they already worked in the "contains" field. Although it wasn't documented anywhere (any chance of just adding a note that regex's work in the contains field?). I'll look forward to the returned functionality. 

[Trevor Peck]

My issue appears to be completely different. I think that the
"playlist" field now only matches songs on a playlist up to the number
that playlist is limited to, instead of from all that would fit if not
limited, which used to be the behavior. My testing was not very
extensive, but the few tests I performed led me to believe this is the
case, and I'll fix my playlists to work this way, which actually gives
me some functionality I've been hoping for.

- Trevor.

[Simon Weber]

Ah, right, that playlist linking behavior was fixed in 3.0.1 to respect limits and sorts.

I've added a new operator for regex match, which is going out now in 3.2.1. I decided to keep the existing operator for non-regex match since that seemed to be how most users were using it; you'll need to manually switch your operators over.

Got thoughts on how I could better share the changelog? I maintain one but don't link to it. Some ideas:

• link to it on the first time the extension ui is launched after an upgrade: least intrusive, but the ui isn't launched very much during normal use.
• show a notification the first time music.google.com is visited after an upgrade: would definitely get people's attention, but might be annoying.
• always show the version in the ui and link to the changelog: doesn't give an indication of when to check it (unless users remember the version number)

>> email to autoplaylists-for-google-music+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

>> To post to this group, send email to

>> autoplaylists-for-google-mu...@googlegroups.com.

[Simon Weber]

I like this suggestion. Tracking in https://github.com/simon-weber/Autoplaylists-for-Google-Music/issues/110:

Posting to this list would be my choice, but I see why that probably
isn't the solution you're looking for. Maybe a link in the UI, down by
settings and help, that is always there, displaying the most recent
version number and release date?

[Eric Carlsen]

I like the idea of a link to the changelog. I hate to say this, because as a developer myself I know how much documentation sucks. But the real answer is to update the help and/or faq to reflect the current state of affairs whenever a change is made (eg. the documentation should have initially mentioned that regexes were supported in the "contains" field, and when that functionality was removed the documentation should have removed the comment stating they were supported (or left a not for a while that they were no longer supported).

But I'm just glad you added the functionality back in. I tested the new contains regex field and it seems to be working again. Thanks.