Test if String is Enclosed

I'm making an IDE for my programming language, and the variables are enclosed in two Carets (or the symbol ^), I would like to change their color.
I have never been very good with Patterns, so I would like to know what Pattern I could use to see if a word (ex. Var) has Carets around it (ex. ^Var^). You're input will be very useful.



Thanks - Lightning.

Lua doesn't use regular expressions, it uses patterns.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Sorry about that, I'll change it.

To get the location in the string of the variable name's start and stop positions.

local startNum = string.find(str,"%^%w+%^") + 1
local endNum = string.find(str,"%^",startNum) -1

That will get you the first letter of the variable name, and the last letter of the variable name.

To find every occurrence and change the color of each variable name would require a few loops, one to loop through and gather each of the start and end positions and post them into a table. And another to loop through the table, and print in sequence up to the saved numbers, change the text color, write the variable name, change the color back, and be able to continue until every variable name is written. I'll leave that bit up to you, but this should work easily for your needs.

That's not what I mean, the string is not like that. It's an array of words.

if string.sub(str,1,1) == "^" and string.sub(str,#str,#str) == "^" and not ( string.find(str," ") ) then

If word has first character as ^ and last character as ^ and has no spaces then
Or to also include the earlier post

local startNum = string.find(str,"%^%w+%^")
local endNum
if startNum then
  endNum = string.find(str,"%^",startNum + 1)
end
if endNum then
  endNum = endNum - 1
  startNum = startNum + 1
  --# BAM it's enclosed in ^'s
end

Or hell, if you just want the pattern to know if it's in the string:

local isThere = string.match(str,"%^%w+%^")
if isThere then
  --#Do stuff
end

Okay, thanks!