whitespace is needed to be parsed with square bracket

[lounlee]

Like below, when I made a rule as fox[*], it needs a whitespace to parse the part with [*]. I understood square bracket as or, and round bracket as and. The round backets seems to work correctly, but square brackets seems to work differently with or. Was it intended to work like this?

rule: fox[*]
-> fox (O)
-> foxs (X)
-> foxes (X)
-> fox fox (O)

rule: fox[s|es]
-> fox (O)
-> foxs (X)
-> foxes (X)
-> fox s (O)
-> fox es (O)
-> fox fox (X)

rule: fox(*)
-> fox (X)
-> foxs (O)
-> foxes (O)
-> fox fox (O)

rule: fox(s|es)
-> fox (X)
-> foxs (O)
-> foxes (O)
-> fox fox (X)

[kirsle]

Optionals are meant to have spaces around them. They're for "optional words", not "or".

The regular expression the optionals turn into makes use of the \b word-boundary metacharacter, which matches on characters that aren't "word characters" (numbers or letters), so if the optional is directly touching a word, no word boundary is detected and it doesn't match properly.

You could use an array for common suffixes. With ! array s = s es, the trigger syntax @s would get expanded into the non-capturing regular expression (?:s|es), so it should work fine directly touching other words in your trigger, like

+ fox@s

# the regexp would become:
/^fox(?:s|es)$/