in reply to Re^2: Reusing a complex regexp in multiple spots, escaping the regexp
in thread Reusing a complex regexp in multiple spots, escaping the regexp

Thanks for your input! The use case is to find references to treat as hyperlinks in Ralf Brown's Interrupt List. The INT/MEM/PORT keywords intentionally are matched only in all-caps to have fewer false positives.
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Re^4: Reusing a complex regexp in multiple spots, escaping the regexp
by LanX (Saint) on Apr 13, 2026 at 13:30 UTC
    I took a quick look into Ralf Brown's Interrupt List and the material is far too vast to be easily understood.

    Please consider providing a SSCCE with sample input if you need further help.

    Please be aware that the AI generated code is far from being correct or the best approach. (I only tossed two prompts at it to generate that output.)

    Hints for improvement

    • the Xs in your hex character class look wrong, I suppose they are only allowed at the beginning like xFF
    • you can define your own named character classes
    • qr snippets can have individual modifiers like qr//xi , this can improve readability a lot
    • I'd enforce a clear naming convention for derived snippets with quantifiers like either trailing _opt or leading opt_ for ?
    • if you want to put your quantifiers after the snippet it might be best to always explicitly put them into a non-capturing group, like (?:$quote)?
    • you can also use named captures inside sub-terms, and only the matching one will show, that's far better than relying on counts like $5
    • you should consider a match all clause like (?<unknown>.*) at the end of your branches, to catch errors or missing implementations (e.g a weird number where you expected a hex)
    • you can embed Perl code into your snippets for debugging the current state with (?{...})
    • last but not least: instead of composing one giant regex, you can also partially match smaller parts and have intermediate logic in Perl with the /c continue-modifier
    Hope this helps :)

    Cheers Rolf
    (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
    see Wikisyntax for the Monastery