in reply to Matching first Perl statement.

I'd suggest working from the back of the statement, stripping off the trailing comment (if it exists) until you find a semi-colon. Munch the leading white space, then you're done -- for the trivial cases.

For a full-featured, robust solution, you will most likely need to use Parse::RecDescent or something else.

This is, of course, a dangerous question to answer because a problem is posed without much definition of how rigorous the answer should be. Caveat emptor.

--t. alex

"Of course, you realize that this means war." -- Bugs Bunny.

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Re: Re: Matching first Perl statement.
by $code or die (Deacon) on Jan 15, 2002 at 03:49 UTC

    I'd suggest working from the back of the statement, stripping off the trailing comment (if it exists) until you find a semi-colon. Munch the leading white space, then you're done -- for the trivial cases.
    If you know where the end of the statment it, then it would have been a trivial question ;) The problem is that you can't guess where the statement ends. Even stripping commments is not a trivial task. Consider the following line: 

    my $foo=';'; $foo =~ s#;##g; #comments start here

    [download]

    As you can see this would be tricky. I use '#' as regex delimters quite a lot. There are so many special cases in perl that you can't easily isolate things like "strip comments" or "first statement" into simple parsers.

    For the origial poster, I would suggest looking at perlTidy for some ideas.



    Simon Flack ($code or die)
    $,=reverse'"ro_';s,$,\$,;s,$,lc ref sub{},e;$,
    =~y'_"' ';eval"die";print $_,lc substr$@,0,3;
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