Comparing string lists with partial match

Questions
,
1

I have two lists of file names, about 200-300 per list. (attached as text files below). The Intersection of the lists is smaller than expected, only around 50 or so; probably the result of appended version number updates.

What I seek is a list of file names that are nearly identical, but have version number updates. I can describe this more accurately as file names that match up to the first non-alphabetical character in the filename. In this case the set of ‘alphabetical’ characters I wish to allow for initial part of string match includes both dash and underscore.

How to approach parsing the names to address that notion?

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enigmatica.txt (9.37 KB)
modded.txt (8.23 KB)

2

Hi Jonathan,

Something like this?

extract[name_] :=  name // StringPosition[DigitCharacter | "."] // Part[#, 1, 1] & // 
  StringTake[name, # - 2] &

extract /@ modded
3

Hi Rohit,

Your function did the trick, thanks! Here’s how I used it to extract a list of files with different version numbers appended to the end

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4

Hi Jonathan,

So now I am curious. Are all of those jar files being used by a single application? I did not recognize the names so I googled and they appear to be related to Minecraft. Can you share what you are trying to do? Totally understand if you cannot or don’t want to.

5

Yes, they are all used as modifications to the game Minecraft, available for download from the modding website CurseForge. Enigmatica is a curated collection of such mods that includes a mod I’m interested in, Ars Nouveau

With hundreds of mods loaded at a time compatibility is an issue, and this is one such case. My current collection ceased running when I added Ars Nouveau to it. So the hunt is on to discover which mod(s) present an incompatibility, and thus require me to choose from a mutually exclusive set.

This list of mods with different version numbers is a first step to making the collection I have also host the mod I want. My next step will be to temporarily disable the various mods from this list to find out where the incompatibility exists.

I’ll be using a divide and conquer technique. I’ll disable half the mods in the list of potential version clash issues, and then try to run the game

  • If the game runs, the conflict was in the disabled half of the list
  • If the game fails to run, the conflict remains in the enabled half

With this list of 58 items the process of trial and error should take about half a dozen tries. Additionally, the first pass of disabling the whole list of version differences will help me determine if the issue is a version mismatch.

6

Rohit’s solution works well, another alternative is

Map[StringSplit[#, "." | DigitCharacter][[1]] &, modded]

splits the strings at the first digit or “.” and grabs the first result.

Another option is pattern matching but that is a bit more complicated (but more powerful).

Regards,

Neil