RegExp puzzle

I'm inexperienced with regex, but I'm not quite certain how to pull this off:

There is a message that I might be afflicted with paralysis. Unfortunately, the way the game does it is to replace various letters with asterisks at random characters:

"A prickly stinging overcomes your body, fading away into numbness."

It will show up like so:

A *rick*y stin*ing *ver*comes ...

Anyway you get the idea.

Now originally, I set up a regex to look like so:
^(A|\*)( |\*)(p|\*)(r|\*)(i|\*)(c|\*)(k|\*)(l|\*)(y|\*).*$

Now this does work.. but with some unintended side effects... if I see a line of all asterisks, then the regex is interpreted to be true. I can't figure out how to make it work so that it would pick up when I have random characters in a line substituted by asterisks, and yet not a solid line of asterisks.

Any hints to get me in the right direction?

Thanks!
Regards,
Neurowiz

Hey, Neuro

This has already come up on this board before, so I'll just post the results of the previous discussion that I use now.

The trigger looks like:

^((?:A|\*)(?: |\*)(?:p|\*)(?:r|\*)(?:i|\*)(?:c|\*)(?:k|\*)(?:l|\*)(?:y|\*)(?: |\*)(?:s|\*)(?:t|\*)(?:i|\*)(?:n|\*)(?:g|\*)(?:i|\*)(?:n|\*)(?:g|\*)(?: |\*)(?:o|\*)(?:v|\*)(?:e|\*)(?:r|\*)(?:c|\*)(?:o|\*)(?:m|\*)(?:e|\*)(?:s|\*)(?: |\*)(?:y|\*)(?:o|\*)(?:u|\*)(?:r|\*)(?: |\*)(?:b|\*)(?:o|\*)(?:d|\*)(?:y|\*)(?:\,|\*)(?: |\*)(?:f|\*)(?:a|\*)(?:d|\*)(?:i|\*)(?:n|\*)(?:g|\*)(?: |\*)(?:a|\*)(?:w|\*)(?:a|\*)(?:y|\*)(?: |\*)(?:i|\*)(?:n|\*)(?:t|\*)(?:o|\*)(?: |\*)(?:n|\*)(?:u|\*)(?:m|\*)(?:b|\*)(?:n|\*)(?:e|\*)(?:s|\*)(?:s|\*)(?:\.|\*))$

This does match on an all-asterix line, but it must have a specific number of asterix in it. Basically, any char in the matched line can be either a certain letter, a space, a punctuation sign or an asterix. I am sure you get the idea.
'?' mean either-or.

There's actually another form of the same line, which has a * after the period and no newline, meaning that the prompt from the following line gets dragged into the end of the matched one. The trigger above can't handle that, so I used a non-regexp trigger to handle it. Obviously, it presumes that there's just one literal form of the message. I am not sure if that is the case, but I am using it for now. Here it is:

A prickly stingin* overwhelms your body, fading away *nto numbness*

Hope that helps.

Correction,

'|' mean either-or; '?' prevent you from getting a too-many-wildcards error, which you would otherwise get with that many parentheses in there.

Actually, it's the ?: together that indicate the pattern should be searched for, but NOT returned as a wildcard. I'm sure you know that Ked, since you use it in your example.

Thank you, Magnum. ? on its own certainly means something different - I need to start using RegExp more often, maybe then I won't have a dozen aliases for every little bit of code in my script file :)