Re: How to use regular expression for this?

Must you use a regular expression? If not, this works:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my @teststrings = qw(ABCXXXXXX AXCXXXXXX AXXDXFXXX AXXXXXXHI XXXXXXGHI
+ XXXXXXXXX AXXXXXXXI);

my $pattern = "ABCDEFGHI";
my $desired_matches = 3;

for (@teststrings) {
   my $result = $pattern ^ $_;
   my $matches = $result =~ tr/\0/ /;
   print "$_\n" if $matches == $desired_matches;
}
[download]

Comment on Re: How to use regular expression for this? Download Code

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Re^2: How to use regular expression for this? by Anonymous Monk on Aug 12, 2005 at 22:48 UTC
I don't have to use regular expression. Can you explain the meaning of: my $result = $pattern ^ $_; my $matches = $result =~ tr/\0/ /; Thanks!!	[reply]
Re^3: How to use regular expression for this? by graff (Chancellor) on Aug 13, 2005 at 00:13 UTC
To elaborate on QM's ~~solution~~ explanation of AReed's solution, the "^" (exclusive-OR) operator, applied to two strings, will treat them as bit vectors, and return a string whose characters each represent 8 bits, in proper order, from the XOR result. If the two strings have the same character at the same offset, the XOR result will be zero (null byte); the "tr/\0/ /" operation will not only convert the nulls to spaces, but will also return the number of nulls found and converted. It's okay if the two strings are not the same length, because the shorter one will be padded with nulls as needed (and any value XOR 0 gives back that same value).	[reply]
Re^3: How to use regular expression for this? by QM (Parson) on Aug 12, 2005 at 23:09 UTC
`my $result = $pattern ^ $_;` [download] This XORs $pattern and $_ together, and stores it in $result. `my $matches = $result =~ tr/\0//;` [download] This counts the number of matches, and puts that into $matches. -QM -- Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of	[reply] [d/l] [select]


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