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Comment by eLobato | Hacker News Reader

This is quite cool, and actually something I'll propose to use at some http://github.com/theforeman repos.

I didn't really understood the format rules, so if the author posted this, a help section would help. I try to enforce

    '%(type) #xxxx(: | -) %{description}'

How would you do that? #xxxx is just an issue number, so it can be #23891, and after that I want a separator from the description, semi colon or hyphen are fine. Probably %{scope} can be used but I didn't really understand it from the inline help, sorry!

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Hi, thanks for the feedback, it would be great to be used by a project like Foreman!

Currently the string for the format only allows the 3 defined variables, type, scope and description. I have been using this style at https://github.com/Gazler/changex/commits/master to give you an idea of how it works.

I was concerned that the format string might be a little weird to get from the help. I will try and clear this up a bit.

I have attempted to build the string that you requested, currently an or separator is not supported, but I can take a look at adding it in.

Here are the format strings that I think match your use case. Using a colon as a separator:

    test string: "Fixes #1234: foo"
    format:      "%{type} #%{scope}: %{description}"
    [type: "Fixes", scope: "1234", description: "foo"]

Using a hyphen as a separator:

    test string: "Fixes #1234 - foo"
    format:      "%{type} #%{scope} - %{description}"
    [type: "Fixes", scope: "1234", description: "foo"]

I hope this makes sense, let me know if you get it working!

Interesting, that makes sense. I'll check if the rest of the team would be ok with forcing commits to use colon as a separator until that feature is added. :)

Still, what does %{scope} actually catch? Anything that's not %{type}, %{description} or an explicit character?

Glad it made sense!

So the match is exact between the non %{..} characters. The idea for scope is the context of the commit, in my libraries I use the name of the class as the scope.

For example with the default format string:

    test string: "fix(User): ensure email address is required"
    format:      "%{type}(%{scope}): %{description}"
    [type: "fix", scope: "User", description: "ensure email address is required"]

So any literal characters are matched exactly and anything inside the capturing %{...} is assigned to that variable.

This does fall over in the following case:

    "fix():(User): ensure email address is required"
    "%{type}(%{scope}): %{description}"
    [type: "fix", scope: "):(User", description: "ensure email address is required"]

It is certainly a candidate for improvement in the future.

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