STYLE: use findIndices instead of findStrings

Hello Mark,
We have a problem here with cfMesh... This change that you made breaks the capability of cfMesh to find patches using regular expressions.

That was the reason why I had used stringListOps.H and findStrings in the first place rather than a plain "pick out of a list" option which is what findIndices from listOps.H does.

Could you kindly change this back to the original implementation so that regular expressions can be used again?

Thank you.

Regards,
Philippose

Okay, that does make some sense, but if that is really the case we should be using either a keyType, wordRe or wordRes as the parameter. If we pass through a patch name as a word, and have it automatically convert to regex somewhere via parameter matching, this is suboptimal.

Hello @mark,
Yes, I think this is something that happened during a previous OpenFOAM API change... Initially, findStrings used to directly interpret the string to be searched for as a regular expression.

I was digging in deeper, and saw that there have been changes made to the stringListOps.H file too. What I just did a few minutes ago, was the following...:

Foam::labelList Foam::Module::polyMeshGenFaces::findPatches
(
    const word& patchName
) const
{
    const wordRe rePatchName(patchName, wordRe::REGEX);
    
    const labelList ids = findMatchingStrings(rePatchName, patchNames());
    
    if (ids.empty())
    {
        WarningInFunction
            << "Cannot find any patch names matching " << patchName << endl;
    }

    return ids;
}

This is now working, and I can use regular expressions for the patch names.

A similar change has to also be made in the file:

cfmesh/meshLibrary/utilities/meshes/triSurf/triSurfFacets.C

I was in the process of doing this when I saw your mail :-)

What do you think of these changes?

(Just to give you an explanation... I am doing this in real-time here, because I need OpenFOAM to work as soon as possible in order to start some simulations :-)...)

Regards,
Philippose

I've started to take a dig, but this is a bit horrible. I think it makes sense to change these to handle a keyType, since that is what it is. But then in places like meshOctreeCreatorCreateOctreeBoxes.C around line 190, we shouldn't be extracting patch names:

const wordList patchNames = dict.toc();

since this immediately flattens things. Instead we should have more like this:

forAllConstIters(dict, iter)
{
    if (!iter().isDict())
    {
        continue;
    }

    const keyType& pName = iter().keyword();
    const dictionary& patchDict = iter().dict();

...
}

That's fine, but does mean facetSubsetIndex() may or may not require a change.

I'd say, make the changes (probably revert) you need to get things working for you. Put it on a new branch, which we can merge in or discuss with @Juretic about his preferred direction for updating.

I'm heading off for holiday tomorrow, so don't be insulted if you hear nothing from me until into September.

I just added you as a developer to our cfmesh repo.

Thanks for giving me developer access. Shall see what can be done. @Juretic has been very quiet on the cfMesh development front, and I have not seen any changes to the original cfMesh code on sourceforge either.

I assume "keyType" is a new data type in OpenFOAM which was added fairly recently? Had not come across this type till I started digging into 1806 earlier today. Need to go a little deeper to see what this data type is all about.

Wish you a wonderful, enjoyable and more importantly a relaxing holiday ahead :-)!

Regards,
Philippose

Actually keyType got added with dictionary regex about 2008 (from Mattijs).