[zgrssd]

While trying to figure out wich unambigious Chat Category Constant name relates to wich category I ran into the issue that the Constant Names are the keys in the global table. They can be identified via Pattern Matching, but they are not a subtable that you can easily itterate over.

Doing excessive pattern matching is bad for performance. Also there are other similary organised groups of values (like the Chat_Channels or all the Event ID's) you might want to find an easy match for.
So I started development on this library. It consists of two files:
mappings.lua

ConstantMapperMappings = {
    { mapping = "ChatCategories", pattern = "^CHAT_CATEGORY_", exclude = "^CHAT_CATEGORY_HEADER" }
}

Just a table. It contains the mapping (wich Key the table will be saved under and will be requestable), the pattern to match (in this case for chat categories) and a pattern to not include (in this case I want all the entries starting with "CHAT_CATEGORY_", except the ones starting wiht "CHAT_CATEGORY_HEADER").
If I also want the chat channels using this library, I just have to modify it like this:

ConstantMapperMappings = {
    { mapping = "ChatCategories", pattern = "^CHAT_CATEGORY_", exclude = "^CHAT_CATEGORY_HEADER" },
    { mapping = "ChatChannels", pattern = "^CHAT_CHANNEL_"}
}

main.lua

local Mappings = ConstantMapperMappings
local data = { }
 
--Make certain data contains a table for each mapping
for i=1, #Mappings, 1 do
    local currentMap = Mappings[i]
    
    if(data[currentMap.mapping] == nil) then
        data[currentMap.mapping] = {}
    end
end
 
--For every entry in the Global table
for key, value in zo_insecurePairs(_G) do
    --Compare it to every mapping
    for i=1, #Mappings, 1 do
        local currentMap = Mappings[i]
        
        if (key):find(currentMap.pattern) and (currentMap.exclude == nil or not(key):find(currentMap.exclude)) then
            --found a Value for this mapping, so store it in the table
            local newentry = { key = key, value = value}
            
            table.insert(data[currentMap.mapping], newentry)
        end
    end
end

I go over all entries in the global table. Compare each entry to each mapping. And if it matches, I store the value as a subtable in Data.
That way I get a easy to itterate over table containing wich ConstantName matches wich Category.

Going over the whoel global table is a lot faster then I anticipated so maybe I switch to a "retreive on demand, but cache" approach instead.

Of course the whole thing will use libStub to avoid multiple execution in the final version. I just wanted to ask if there are any mistakes in this code I have to look out for.