what's this thing called: [^,]

[happyclown]

I've seen variants of this thing in other threads ie. [A-z 0-9]. I've even attempted to use [^,] once(unsucessfully), without really knowing what it does.

What is it called?

If you use [^,] in a scanf statement the comma will be ignored by scanf?

Does anyone have a link on how to use it(and the context in which it is used)?

Thanks in advance.

[tabstop]

In a scanf format string, it's called a scanset. You should look up scanf in any reputable source (such as say "man scanf") to find out more information.

In your case [^,] matches everything except a comma, so it would probably be used in parsing comma-separated values.

[esbo]

The ^ is called a carat incidently if thats what you meant.

Incidently does [^abcdef] mean everything apart from abcdef, I think it does.
Not 100% though. Or would it be ^[abcdef]? I think the latter.

They are used not just in programming C, unix/linux used them too and other programs as well.
http://www.regular-expressions.info/quickstart.html

[laserlight]

Incidently does [^abcdef] mean everything apart from abcdef, I think it does.

Yes, it matches a character not among those listed.

[esbo]

Yes, it matches a character not among those listed.

So not ^[abcdef] then?
I guess not it did look wrong.

[^abcdef]

I used to be really good at them in when I used to use the vi editor but I have forgotten
most of it now as I no longer use it.

Actually I just reallised notepad++ does allow you to use them so may I should relearn them. They can save you a lot of work. For example swopping two columns of names
eg

Fred Smith
Bill Blogs
Tom Brown

Takes ages to do manually if you have 100's of lines.

I think it was somoething like

\{[a-Z]\} {\{[a-Z]\}/\{2\}\{1\}/

That's probably wrong though there might be a bit more to it but basically it capures the data and you can specify the column by number.

Or maybe it was more like this:-

\{[a-Z]\} {\{[a-Z]\}/\2 \1/

Anyway I can have a play around with it and see what happens

[esbo]

Don't think I can do it in notepad but I think it was

:%s/\{*[a-Z]\} {\{*[a-Z]\}/\2 \1/

In vi. I think.