If you don’t know what regular expressions are, this is probably best ignored for the sake of your own sanity.
If you do know what regular expressions are, the same advice may still apply.
You can use regular expressions (regex) to manipulate Twaddle output. The syntax is
similar to other Twaddle functions, but the regex itself
(demarcated with a double slash // marking its beginning and end) takes
the place of the function name.
Two arguments are accepted: the text to run the regex on, and the text to be used in place of any matches:
[//<regex>//:<text>;<replacement>]
regex is the regex to be run,
text is the text over which the regex should run
replacement is the text which should be used as a replacement for each regex match
So a very simple use of a regular expression in Twaddle looks like:
[//\ss//:a silly snake was in the sand; sss]
which produces the output:
a sssilly sssnake was in the sssand
All standard Twaddle sentence features are available within the text. For example:
[//^\w//:<noun>;XXX]
will replace the first character of the line with XXX, giving a result of
perhaps XXXotorbike
Similarly, Twaddle sentence features can be used within the replacement:
[//[124]//:1 2 3 4 5;<noun.plural>]
will replace the characters 1, 2, and 4 with a randomly chosen plural noun, giving results like:
air fresheners people 3 warehouses 5
Additionally, the match function can be used within the
replacement text to insert the sequence which was matched, for example:
[//[aeiou]+//:double vowel sequences;[match][match]]
produces:
dououblee vooweel seequeuencees
The regex implementation is provided by the re module from the Python standard library. Consult the module documentation for more on the syntax.