Text Funnel question

Using the -≠ combination in the second parameter of a text funnel, the “≠” non-matching character works the same as the “=” matching character:

message "Now is the time"["≠N","-≠t"]  ☞ "ow is the t"

and

message "Now is the time"["≠N","-=t"]  ☞ "ow is the t"

This is only noticeable with the leading “-” character. Is this expected and am I using it improperly? I see this result was the same as in Panorama 6.

I’m going to punt on this.

First of all, I completely forgot that these options even existed. I had to look at the documentation, and yep, there it is. Then I looked at the source code, and yes, there is code for this.

I notice that there are no examples in the documentation of using ≠ in the second parameter of the funnel, and there are also no examples of using - and ≠ together. I think I came up with some applications for this, got them working and documented them, and didn’t exhaustively investigate every possible combination, either with Panorama 6 (actually 2 or 3, when this was invented) or Panorama X.

I’m potentially surprised that these cases work the same in Panorama 6 and X. The underlying code is definitely COMPLETELY different.

Anyway, I think probably the code doesn’t quite exactly match every word of the documentation here, in other words, one or more rather obscure bugs exist. I suspect you would agree with me that the priority level of this is negative. Going forward, I would suggest using regular expressions for these kind of tasks, rather than an odd proprietary system I invented over 25 years ago (in my defense, at that time regular expressions didn’t exist yet, or at best were in their infancy).

I think the short answer is

  1. I’m not quite sure what is expected, but probably not this, and
  2. I’m again not quite sure, but I think you are probably doing it ok. In other words, it’s not you, it’s me.

I keep trying obscure code and stumble on things that fell through the cracks years ago and really don’t need a fix at this late date. Just was curious if I had misunderstood the docs or used the wrong syntax. No problemo.