How do I filter based on the presence of a {query}?

[JolinM]

I right now use a Condition if {query} is less than «.», but it somehow seams wrong.

Isn’t there some more elegant way to do it?

 

Best,

[deanishe]

4 hours ago, JolinM said:

it somehow seams wrong

 

It is wrong. Less/more than X is for numbers. What should “less than ‘.’” mean?

 

4 hours ago, JolinM said:

Isn’t there some more elegant way to do it?

 

Do what?

[JolinM]

I thought "." was a wildcard in GREP 🤔.

 

I actually want to filter based on the presence of absence of a query. My keyword has «Argument optional».

[Vero]

@JolinM You could just do "If query is equal to [blank], take the first path, else (when there is a query) do the "else" action". Sounds like it should do what you want?

 

Or I may have misunderstood your question, in which case, please provide more details  

 

Cheers,
Vero

[deanishe]

17 minutes ago, JolinM said:

I thought "." was a wildcard in GREP 🤔.

 

If you mean in regular expressions, yes it is. But if you're trying to match a regular expression, you need to set it to "matches regex", not "is less than".

 

17 minutes ago, JolinM said:

I actually want to filter based on the presence of absence of a query. My keyword has «Argument optional».

 

Then use "is equal to" or "is not equal to" and leave the box empty.

 

FWIW, the correct regular expression for this case would be .+ (i.e. one or more characters). If you just use . that means “one, and only one, character”

 

Edited October 7, 2020 by deanishe

[JolinM]

Oh, both solutions are brilliant, thanks a lot for the insight!

[vitor]

8 hours ago, JolinM said:

I thought "." was a wildcard in GREP

 

grep uses regular expressions, which are similar to but different from wildcards. As way of example, .* in the former is just * on the latter.

[deanishe]

28 minutes ago, vitor said:

grep uses regular expressions, which are similar to but different from wildcards.

 

And different to (much more limited than) the regular expressions Alfred supports. And the regex engine Alfred uses is a bit unusual.