Matching a non-empty pattern about comby HOT 2 OPEN

:[b:e] - sounds like it might do what I want it to do, but doesn't (apparently it doesn't like the function () { }

Yeah this gets close, but the limitation is it won't match across the whitespace between function() { }. If you are sure that the second argument is always of the form function() {...} this corresponds to two expressions like :[f:e] :[braces:e] where f matches function() and braces match the block in braces {...}.

Sooo... I guess I'm looking for a non-empty variant of :[x] ?

The alternative here is to use a rule to case out on non-empty matches of :[x]. Something like -rule 'where :[x] != ""' should work on the command line?

from comby.

Thanks for responding! I appreciate the workaround. Feels to me like the -rule approach would probably be best for my case, I'd prefer not to have to make assumptions on the form of the particular expression.

Seems like this would be a common enough use case that it might warrant special syntax?

from comby.