RegEx on GPS coordinates seems to fail for some reason?!

Questions & Suggestions
1

I have a macro that performs a regex search in a text to find GPS coordinates.

The macro however DID work with KM 8.0.x, but now I updated to 8.2 and now it does not work. The setting says “notify on failure” but it does not notify anything, and the macro just stops without error code.

I tried to perfom this regex:
GPS-Nord: N ([4-5][0-9])(.)([0-9]{1,2})(.)([0-9]{1,2})(.)([0-9]{1,2})
on a text containing this line:
GPS-Nord: N 49°23’36.63

Obviously it is not the most elegant expression, but I just wanted to “hard code” it to this line.

But the macro does not return a result. I placed some “display text” commands before this regex, so I know it stops at the regex.

Any ideas? Why won’t it work?

2

The regexp itself seems to work fine: regex101: build, test, and debug regex

What do the options in the Action that invokes it look like?

3

Please post:

  1. Your entire Macro (image and file)
  2. Real-world sample data (everything the RegEx will be seeing as its source string)

BTW, everywhere you are using [0-9] you can just use \d

4

Thank you for your replies!

I want to conclude this topic for now, because:

  • The regex is not faulty
  • The problem was identifiable with the Keyboard Maestro error log file
  • I can’t post the entire macro because it is a) huge and b) contains company data and it’s way too much to censor it all out, sorry!
5

Perhaps you could share the cause and fix of the problem so others may benefit.

6

Okay, here we go!

The cause of the failure was a DIFFERENT regex that failed to find a certain term.

It is important to note that, apparently (?), Keyboard Maestro macros are stopped entirely if a regex search yields no match.

Wouldn’t it be better if, in case of a failed search, all variables would be passed on as empty strings? Paging @peternlewis

7

You can actually have it either way. In the Action Gear menu there is an option that you can check/uncheck for "Failure Aborts Macro".

This option is available in most Actions.

2 Likes
8

Thanks a ton for the clarification.

You never stop learning with apps like KM… :sweat_smile: