Request for some help regarding Crowdin Verbal Expression use

Hey guys, I’m feeling kinda stupid, but I just don’t get how to use the Verbal Expression syntax.

:one: Firstly, could somebody provide some working expressions as examples? (I just can’t find any good examples for Verbal Expression use online.)

:two: Secondly, Is it possible to write Verbal Expressions for the following queries?

  1. Strings with maximum 14 characters.
  2. Strings with only one translation.
  3. Strings with translations from only one specific user
  4. Strings with translations NOT from certain users
  5. Strings where the approved tranlation is not the one with the most votes

Any input is very much welcome!

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  1. I suppose it’s not highly popular tool. As far as I know, folks from Enterprise use custom QA checks and custom placeholders in all cases, and folks from regular Crowdin are just fine with what they have without customisation. I’ve googled and didn’t find anything on the matter.

  2. I suppose should be possible, but one by one maybe. As for 1) - limit pattern (characters) limit “1,3” and so on.

You will need a developer from your team to do this for you. They know such things well.

Unfortunately it looks like this feature doesn’t work at all. They should just allow to use proper regex.

I try the verbal expression
starts “word”
which does not give the pop-up error message of “invalid verbal expression”,
and all the same results as without the verbal expression show up, including all of the results that do Not have “word” as their first word. The result is the same whether I set the scope to only “translations”, or leave it as “everything”.
The verbal expression filter has no effect.

Crowdin, please just provide a normal regex function that works, or if this Verbal Expression feature does in fact do what it is supposed to, please fix your own article about verbal expressions providing examples of use for all possible arguments. Thanks.

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I assume default regex is hard to implement technically. In case it was easy, then it’ll be already added. Don’t see anything in verbal expression about “word” so maybe it’s just work in another way that you expect.

Hello, I must respond because this feature is broken and Crowdin should fix it, and your unrelated reply may wrongly suggest misunderstanding on my part. While my response sadly does not solve the OP’s question either, I did read his question (I have looked for the same thing before) and I did try to get the feature to work myself. It seems from your reply that you have not read the prior messages in the conversation and certainly not tried to use this Verbal Expression feature yourself . As I wrote, the expression I tried with not effect does not throw an “Invalid Verbal Expression” error like other tries did, therefore it is a valid Verbal Expression, and as such it is supposed to do something (in this case, match only results which start with the word ‘word’, literally), but in fact it does not affect the results of the search in any way. In my example, the literal word “word” between quote marks could be replaced by any other word of your choice, the point is this Verbal Expression is not having any effect. You can try the feature yourself and update us if you find that I was using it incorrectly.

The original poster of this question thread linked in his question the article from Crowdin that is supposed to show how to use their own Verbal Expressions feature. That article is very deficient, having examples for only some of the arguments supposedly supported by this feature, and zero complete use examples that show an entire Verbal Expression search and its results (what the OP was asking to see). The article is useless, as the OP was pointing out. I tried to use a simple verbal expression in my search filter based on the partial examples in that article, and the verbal expression, while valid, does not have the expected effect (or any effect at all). Again, you are welcome to try it yourself and report back. The OP and I both would really appreciate it if someone could show how this feature actually works (if it does, which it seems not to).

Regarding regex (Regular Expressions) being “hard to implement technically”, regex is a syntax for string matching in use for decades and supported in many different programming languages. What I gather from searching about Verbal Expressions is that “Verbal Expressions” in the use we are discussing are supposed to be a more readable and user friendly version of regex, built on top of regex, so if anything they are adding complication to regex, and if they in fact work then they work because there is regex working underneath. In Crowdin’s own article about their Verbal Expressions feature mentioned above, they explicitly write in their half-empty table that the argument ‘start’ is equivalent to using the caret ^ symbol before a sequence of characters, which is the normal regex syntax for that condition (beginning with …). So if their Verbal Expressions can work, it is because regex can work in their queries.

The OP’s question defines what they are asking for precisely, and gives another 5 specific and clearly understandable questions, which are also not supported by the current features, and would make a lot of sense. It is a very good question. The first reply he got from another user 2 months ago offers nothing, the person does not seem to have tried the feature by themselves.
My comment from a few hours ago intended to confirm that the feature does not work as expected providing a specific example of its use where the Verbal Expression is received as valid, but has no effect. It is not solving the question, but it is supporting the idea that the feature is not working and that the documentation offered for this feature is useless. The last reply to my comment, again offers nothing. I am typing all this because this feature would be very useful, and the present search function, while usable, is lacking features that it could very well support and gain a lot from. Which is what this question thread is about.

In my opinion no case that you’ve described can be managed or caught by Verbal Expression.

This thing is useful for cases like

string that starts from small letter and ends with capital letter B
or
string that contain symbol $ and nothing more

Theoretically, CroQL may partially work for you

At least there you can write down things like “translations from user A” or “not more than 15 characters”

But the syntax of requests will be more complicated that with verbal expressions for sure.

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Thanks for sharing the CroQL documentation, you are right that this looks like the way to solve OP’s questions.

As for Verbal Expressions, there is still no indication that this feature works at all in the search filter.

I also use CroQL and it works good. The expressions maybe just outdated, or rarely used, so that’s why there’s no much documentation on the matter.