in reply to "Inverse" Pattern Matching

we had a similar question not long ago: Using special characters in left part of a regex match?

In short: It's not easy!!!

I'm not sure how efficient it is but I might try to code all possibilities into a long or-clause

/(12345x|1234x6|123x56|123x6| ...)/

please note that from 5.10 on such expressions are efficiently trie-optimized.

Another approach could be to match all "x" and surrounding n bytes to be further investigated...

edit

something like /(1 [2-5]{0,4} x [2-5]{0,4} 6)/gx in a while loop to narrow the set of possible matches.

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

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Re^2: "Inverse" Pattern Matching
by hdb (Monsignor) on Jul 05, 2013 at 12:22 UTC

    Thanks a lot. The long or-clause probably grows exponentially with the length of the pattern but if I combine it with your other proposal it might work.

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