Expect flushing buffer

1
votes

I am writing a tcl/expect script to check for the a string output of an event and if found then do something. Below is the code i have,

proc cli_detect_event {cmd value} {
    cli_send "$cmd"

    expect -timeout 3 $value {
    } timeout fail
}

So when i send $cmd i get and event which should match $value hopefully. I was wanting to know is there a way to prevent what's in the expect_out(buffer) from being thrown away when expect is used again after this proc, so that I could expect match on the same outputs from the command I sent?

2
tclexpect
Why not just save the contents of the buffer in another variable, and use regex to parse it if you need to? - Niall Byrne

2 Answers

0
votes

The expect buffer variable is associated with its spawn_id variable, thus to ensure that your expect_out(buffer) is used you can just pass in the spawn id

proc cli_detect_event {cmd value spawnId } {
    cli_send "$cmd"

    expect -i $spawnId -timeout 3 $value {
    } timeout fail
}

This should fix your issue. The only thing is that you need to ensure you save the spawn_id when you spawn a process

0
votes

AFAIK no.

If the timeout occured then the buffer can be searched by next expect clause. But if the $value matched then everything up to this point including the $value itself is thrown away from the buffer (and printed to user).