it is apparently "almost" trivial to smart match against a vast swathe of regex patterns by smart matching an array.

my $regexp = join '|', @patterns;
$str =~ /$regexp/
[download]

That's cool. But what if I want to sub out as a result ?

$cleanLine =~ s/$_//g for @regexps;
[download]

... smart match ... substitution ...

Its called "smart match" not substitution

There is no "smart" subsitution

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrequick.html#Search-and-replace

perlfaq6/How can I hope to use regular expressions without creating illegible and unmaintainable code?

perlfaq6/How do I efficiently match many regular expressions at once?

perlfaq6/What good is \G in a regular expression?

Anonymous Monk, You're not really answering my question other than telling me my thinking is wrong. I clearly asked what the best way to do bulk-pattern substitution is. If "smart match" is not the correct thinking, then please, feel free to elaborate on what the best way is... ;-)

Are these the real regexes you want to "parallelize"?

Step one (a): use one regex with a [char-class] with '\ and so on

Step one (b): combine others with or-clauses in your regex (A|B)

Step two: process more than one line at a time by joining them together.

Cheers Rolf

PS: Je suis Charlie!

update

added (one b)

Anonymous Monk, You're not really answering my question other than telling me my thinking is wrong. I clearly asked what the best way to do bulk-pattern substitution is. If "smart match" is not the correct thinking, then please, feel free to elaborate on what the best way is... ;-)

Lets, see , match operator matches, substitution operator substitutes ... understanding that one is apples and the other is oranges, even if they're both food, is very very important

You've used a sufficient amount of "invented" vocabulary, so I gave you the answer in the form of a link

but, you failed my litmus test, you didn't read the link I gave you, you didn't find the syntax you're looking for,

so, we're at the point of waiting for you to read my link , and ask a question about it

Smart matching, introduced in Perl v5.10, was retroactively made experimental, with warnings as of v5.18. That means the operator may undergo significant changes or even be removed later! In general, if you want your code to be compatible across many versions of Perl, using regular loops, map or grep instead of its distributive property is better.

In this case, since in your example all the replacement parts of s/// are empty, the "looping over an array of regular expressions" technique is probably better. Also, unless the order of the substitutions you show in your example matters, maybe some of your regular expressions can be condensed (e.g. maybe s{[/?;.].*}{}?).

Well according to Albert would "faster than light" mean to travel back in time... (at least that's the interpretation of Minkowski diagrams) IIRC...

Though you should go on diet first, since your mass would become infinite at speed of light, otherwise you'll have your personal episode of big bang theory. ;)

Cheers Rolf

PS: Je suis Charlie!

Yes, indeed. An astute comment! Time will run backwards, but still for an infinite amount of (backwards) time.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

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