| It is trivial to do as the hard work has been done for you

Care to elaborate?

| what kind of "hell hole" are you working for that they want you to do this

I have regexes in Perl that I want to export to JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby. At least JS doesn't support the /x modifier.

Care to elaborate?

Hehe, ok

In this serialization they show as        " ",  #" ", but in the wx gui you can see these are merely PPIx::Regexp::Token::Whitespace=HASH(0x178d3f4)

So all you do is walk the tree and delete/remove stuff you dont want,

when done serialize and what you're left is the non /x version

html explanation

Read more... (6 kB)

Here is text version from the gui it also shows xRe::Token::Comment

Read more... (7 kB)

So here is where you'd start, pluck out the whitespace from this tree

Maybe use Data::Diver ( data diver )

Or maybe just copy http://search.cpan.org/perldoc/PPIx::Regexp::Node#find

and use the GUI is for interactive visualization.

$ perl -MPPIx::Regexp -MData::Dump -le " $r=PPIx::Regexp->new(q{s{ \d+
+    \w+ }{}gx}); dd( $r ); print $r->content; "
bless({
  children => [
    bless({ content => "s" }, "PPIx::Regexp::Token::Structure"),
    bless({
      children => [
        bless({ content => "\\d" }, "PPIx::Regexp::Token::CharClass::S
+imple"),
        bless({ content => "+" }, "PPIx::Regexp::Token::Quantifier"),
        bless({ content => " ", perl_version_introduced => "5.000" }, 
+"PPIx::Regexp::Token::Whitespace"),
        bless({ content => " ", perl_version_introduced => "5.000" }, 
+"PPIx::Regexp::Token::Whitespace"),
        bless({ content => " ", perl_version_introduced => "5.000" }, 
+"PPIx::Regexp::Token::Whitespace"),
        bless({ content => " ", perl_version_introduced => "5.000" }, 
+"PPIx::Regexp::Token::Whitespace"),
        bless({ content => "\\w" }, "PPIx::Regexp::Token::CharClass::S
+imple"),
        bless({ content => "+" }, "PPIx::Regexp::Token::Quantifier"),
        bless({ content => " ", perl_version_introduced => "5.000" }, 
+"PPIx::Regexp::Token::Whitespace"),
      ],
      finish => [bless({ content => "}" }, "PPIx::Regexp::Token::Delim
+iter")],
      max_capture_number => 0,
      start => [
        bless({ content => "{" }, "PPIx::Regexp::Token::Delimiter"),
        bless({ content => " ", perl_version_introduced => "5.000" }, 
+"PPIx::Regexp::Token::Whitespace"),
      ],
      type => [],
    }, "PPIx::Regexp::Structure::Regexp"),
    bless({
      children => [],
      finish   => [bless({ content => "}" }, "PPIx::Regexp::Token::Del
+imiter")],
      start    => [bless({ content => "{" }, "PPIx::Regexp::Token::Del
+imiter")],
      type     => [],
    }, "PPIx::Regexp::Structure::Replacement"),
    bless({ content => "gx", modifiers => { g => 1, x => 1 } }, "PPIx:
+:Regexp::Token::Modifier"),
  ],
  effective_modifiers => { g => 1, x => 1 },
  failures => 0,
  source => "s{ \\d+    \\w+ }{}gx",
}, "PPIx::Regexp")

s{ \d+    \w+ }{}gx
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