CafeTran

I know almost nothing about regular expressions, but I would like to make my glossaries as compact as I could with regular expressions. For example, how could I instruct CT to show "depending on" for any of the following source terms?

a seconda di

a seconda dei

a seconda degli

Thanks in advance

IK: the user can easily modify

Thank you.

H.

And what with all this talk about pipe dreams?

woorden: The basics are there, Kmitowski and Dimitriopolos took care of that.

Well, I guess that would be Igor and me. You should've seen my regular expression when that degree of TM fuzziness hit me full face. It was quite a spectacle.

For Igor: your "|a seconda d.{1,4}?" solution works well, thank you. But, the glossary now shows "|a seconda d.{1,4}?" instead of "a seconda d" in the Italian column. Should it be so? 

Thank you. I'll ned to get used to that, but most important is that regexes work (at my level, at least).

IK: ...the user can easily modify

Mario: But, the glossary now shows "|a seconda d.{1,4}?" instead of "a seconda d" in the Italian column

Igor, are you still perfectly sure that "the user" can "easily modify"?

By the way, I'm going to post in the CafeTran section of ProZ an article that will claim that it's perfectly possible to use CafeTran without regexes, scripts, and KeyBoard Maestro macros. I have this idea that the majority of the previous postings on that forum concern that subject (and in a very wrong way), and are extremely harmful for CafeTran. (The posting cannot use any politically incorrect items, nor F-words, so I'll have to rewrite it to make it lethal anyway).

H.

Igor: blabla

You know what, Igor? Goodbye, and thank you for all the fish.

H.

Igor: CafeTran shows the glossary term as it is entered in the glossary while you can see the caught term by the regular expression in the source language editor.

Please help me understand if I am understanding these things correctly. My idea would be to use regexes to automatically cater for both singulars and plurals. Then, if my trilingual glossary contains:

pino giapponese    momi fir    コメツガ

and I want to cater for plurals too like this:

pini giapponesi    momi firs    コメツガ,

I should edit the glossary like this:

|abet(e|i) giappones(e|i)   |momi fi(r|rs)   コメツガ

Indeed, when actually translating in the glossary pane the following shows up:

For momi fir: momi fir(r|rs)  and  |abet(e|i) giappones(e|i)

For momi firs: the same as above

Is this correct?

But when I start typing in the editor, CT suggests "abet(ei) giappones(ei), and if I accept it by pressing Enter, then I should edit it to make these two words singular or plural as necessary.

Is my understanding correct? Or, as Woorden seems to suggest, I should abandon this idea altogether and use fragments from memory instead? (Woorden: did I understand correctly what you mean?) 

Yeah, while I was waiting for your answer I reconsidered everything and came more or less to the same conclusion, at least for now, since I have no sufficient knowledge about regular expressions nor time right now for experimenting.