Re: Strange Behavior while Parsing Sendmail logs

It would seem that somehow the whole log line is getting matched by the (^,+) part of the regex because that's what's getting substituted back in.

Just in case this isn't clear yet, it isn't that the mentioned part of the regex is matching the whole line, it is that the regex is failing and no substitution is taking place

It does no good to have an unanchored .* at both ends.

This looks like one of the regex optimizer bugs. You should post it to comp.lang.perl.moderated or submit it with perlbug.

I'd write this:

if(  $_ =~ / to=([^,]+), /  ) {
    $to_addr = $1;
} else {
    warn "Unmatched to= in line: $_";
}
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RE: Re: Strange Behavior while Parsing Sendmail logs by Anonymous Monk on Jul 19, 2000 at 05:45 UTC
It does no good to have an unanchored .* at both ends. but it does because regexps are greedy (by default). If they weren't there, the substitution would do nothing, it would just put $1 back where it found it. But the .* cause the whole line to be matched, and thus only the $1 is put back in. that said it is no doubt safer to anchor such a regex	[reply]
RE: RE: Re: Strange Behavior while Parsing Sendmail logs by tye (Sage) on Jul 19, 2000 at 06:44 UTC
Sorry, you are right. I think I was thinking ahead to the change I made to just match against the line and just assign `$1` to the variable. Mea culpa.	[reply] [d/l]