Modding with wildcard xpath csv statements?

[seven]

So if you have a zombie expansion mod and wish to remove a specific zombie from the spawn groups, I can write a remove for each group. But if there are many, many groups, will this work?

<csv xpath="/entitygroups/entitygroup/text()" delim="\n" op="remove" >
CustomZombie1
</csv

Further, say there are two zombies you wish to remove, will this work?

<csv xpath="/entitygroups/entitygroup/text()" delim="\n" op="remove" >
CustomZombie1

CustomZombie2
</csv

I have tested both, and both seem to work. At least there are no errors thrown starting the game and the configs dump looks ok. But am I missing something? I haven't found a lot of information on csv edits in my googling.

 

[khzmusik]

You are correct, both will work.

The "remove" op also accepts wildcards, so the second example could just be this (assuming those are the only two custom zombies):
 

<csv xpath="/entitygroups/entitygroup/text()" delim="\n" op="remove" >CustomZombie*</csv>




The reason you can't find much information through Google, is because "csv" is not standard XPath. It's something TFP created to modify lists, especially comma-separated values (hence the name).

SphereII has a good explanation of it, here: 

 

[seven]

Thank you for the reply. That thread is one of the few bits I found. It's good to know about the wildcard in the zombie name, kind of missed that, but those were poor example names, any they actually differ a lot.

Maybe wildcard wasn't the proper term. I wasn't sure if by not selecting specific groups with an @name= or starts with if it would select all groups (what I meant by 'wildcard') and then apply the remove only where appropriate. You're right, it's been working fine. Thank you for the confirmation.

 

[khzmusik]

I wasn't sure if by not selecting specific groups with an @name= or starts with if it would select all groups (what I meant by 'wildcard') and then apply the remove only where appropriate.

That is actually an XPath feature. Every XPath expression always selects a collection of XML nodes. It could contain one node, many nodes, or no nodes (but in this case 7D2D will issue a warning in the console).

A lot of times, people want that collection to only have one member, and that's why they include predicates like [@name="whatever"]. But you don't have to use a predicate, and if you're trying to remove a type of zombie from the game, what you did is exactly what I would do.

 

[seven]

Yeah, I've used that feature often, but csv is unlike any other xpath statement I've used, and this is the first time doing anything with it. Seems powerful, TFP did a good job with it.