[eLobato]

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!

[Gazler]

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!

[eLobato]

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?

[Gazler]

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.