Bot Code (for Jesse) or anyone else who likes code

WARNING: strictly a code post!

Here's the basic code I use for a chatbot in ActionScript 3.0. You can see it's fussy with everything needing to be declared before things get started. It takes the line "Clean the house" and checks it against three different regular expressions. Then it chooses a random answer from a group of answers in the my_ans array.

I'd thought switch/case might make it all cleaner but now I think I'll stick with the system that's working. Flash doesn't have as many features in regular expressions as JavaScript.


var i:int;
var m:int;
var questnum:int=3;
var allquests:Array= new Array();
var my_ans:Array= new Array();


var rg0:RegExp = /goomba/i
var rg1:RegExp = /It is/i
var rg2:RegExp = /clean/i


var testline:String = "Clean the house";


for(i=0;i<questnum;i++) {
allquests.push(this["rg"+i]);//so can access in next line
}

for(i=0;i<questnum;i++) {
if(testline.search(allquests[i])!=-1){
trace("gotcha!"+i)
if(i==0){my_ans=["goomba is nice","GOOMBA?","goomba-never"]}
if(i==1){my_ans=["It certainly is","is what?"]}
if(i==2){my_ans=["It's clean already","how clean","cleaner than dirt","like, Mr. Clean?"]}
m = Math.floor(Math.random() * my_ans.length);
trace(my_ans[m])}
}

The other thing I don't like about this is the answers are far away in the code, from the questions, and it can be a pain adding things. I may try making individual functions for each answer, since there are often qualifying conditions within a reply, as in this example from Whinsey:

if(a==106){
var hum=/CONDO|MOTEL|HOTEL|HOUSE|CASTLE|DUMP|APARTMENT/i
if(righto.search(hum)!=-1){ans=["I have seen the inside of your "+RegExp.lastMatch+" and you should clean it!"]}

else{ans=[righto+ " is my home away from home!"]}
mood=1}>

Flash doesn't do RegExp.lastMatch for instance. righto is RegExp.RightContext.

Can you believe I know all this? NUTS!