in reply to Re: Search for consecutive flush left curly braces
in thread Search for consecutive flush left curly braces

Won't that mach a right-curly, followed by any-number-of-any-characters, followed by not-a-left-curly? Isn't a left-curly included in any-number-of-any-characters?

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

  • Comment on Re^2: Search for consecutive flush left curly braces

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^3: Search for consecutive flush left curly braces
by stevieb (Canon) on Jun 10, 2015 at 16:05 UTC

    No, at least not as how I understand it. The (?!{) is a negative-lookahead, meaning match any characters non-greedily as long as they do NOT contain a {, before the next }.

    If I'm wrong, someone will inform me ;)

      OK, you’re wrong. SCNR. :-)

      First off, for the reason given by QM, this regex doesn’t prevent a match if there is a { character between } characters:

      2:57 >perl -wE "my $s = '}abc{def}'; say 'match' if $s =~ /}.*(?!{)}/ +;" match 2:59 >

      Second, there is no non-greedy match here: .* is greedy. But making it non-greedy doesn’t help:

      2:59 >perl -wE "my $s = '}abc{def}'; say 'match' if $s =~ /}.*?(?!{)} +/;" match 2:59 >

      A negated character class is what is needed:

      3:31 >perl -wE "my $s = '}abc{def}'; say 'match' if $s =~ /}[^{]*?}/; +" 3:31 >perl -wE "my $s = '}abc|def}'; say 'match' if $s =~ /}[^{]*?}/; +" match 3:31 >

      Hope that helps,

      Update: Tweaked the third code snippet.

      Athanasius <°(((><contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

        Thanks... The lack of the non-greedy quantifier was a typo. I thought I was getting a grasp on the lookaheads so back to the drawing board it is! :)