comment on

If you can advance incrementally through the text, you could try anchoring all of your patterns at pos with \G. Since pos is an lvalue, you could store the previous match position, try each pattern in priority order starting at the same previous position, take whichever match you prefer, store that into pos, and repeat for the next chunk. Something like: (untested)

my $lastpos = 0;
while ($lastpos < length $_) {
  my @matches = (undef x 3);
  pos = $lastpos;
  $matches[0] = pos if m/\G([^/?!"]+[.?!"])/gc;      #FIRST PRIORITY
  pos = $lastpos;
  $matches[1] = pos if m/\G([^:;-]+[:;-])/gc;      #SECOND PRIORITY
  pos = $lastpos;
  $matches[2] = pos if m/\G(.*(?:\n|\r|\z|$))/gc;   #LAST PRIORITY

  # somehow choose which match to use for the next cycle and set $last
+pos here
  #   substr $_, $lastpos, ($matches[$chosen] - $lastpos)
  #  should yield the selected chunk between choosing a match and upda
+ting $lastpos
}
[download]

In reply to Re: How to enforce match priority irrespective of string position by jcb
in thread How to enforce match priority irrespective of string position by Polyglot

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.


Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
	PerlMonks