how to express $temp =~ s/.*?from://; in perl 4

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: how to express $temp =~ s/.*?from://; in perl 4 by splinky (Hermit) on Jul 30, 2000 at 18:45 UTC
Since you're looking for a constant string, you can use substr and index in place of the regex, like so: `$temp = substr ( $temp, index ( $temp, 'from:' ) + 5 ) if $temp =~ /from:/;` [download] Note that, since I don't have Perl 4 installed anywhere, the code above is untested under Perl 4. Woof	[reply] [d/l]
Re: how to express $temp =~ s/.*?from://; in perl 4 by davorg (Chancellor) on Jul 30, 2000 at 19:23 UTC
Don't do that. Perl 4 has known security issues. You shouldn't be using it for anything. Please upgrade to Perl 5. -- <http://www.dave.org.uk> European Perl Conference - Sept 22/24 2000, ICA, London <http://www.yapc.org/Europe/>	[reply]
Re: how to express $temp =~ s/.*?from://; in perl 4 by young perlhopper (Scribe) on Jul 30, 2000 at 21:12 UTC
I assume from your regex that you are expecting more than one 'from:' to appear in the string and you only want to deal with everything up to the first one. It is easy to simply make the .* nongreedy, but would it be possible for you to make a more specific regular expression that would take into account what comes before or after the from:? i.e. if you are expecting a number to come after this four, but you won't see a number after any other four, then do: `$temp =~ s/.*from:( \d+)/$1/;` [download] Unless you are optimizing for speed, I consider it a good habit to make regex's as specific as possible so that you avoid matching unwanted strings without knowing it. Hope this helps, Mark	[reply] [d/l]
Re: how to express $temp =~ s/.*?from://; in perl 4 by Anonymous Monk on Jul 30, 2000 at 22:26 UTC
Use a negated character class: `$temp = "notfrom:nowhere"; # Match zero or more non-f characters followed by "from:" $temp =~ s/[^f]*from://; print "$temp\n";` [download] Prints "nowhere".	[reply] [d/l]
RE: Re: how to express $temp =~ s/.*?from://; in perl 4 by merlyn (Sage) on Jul 30, 2000 at 22:32 UTC
That's not the same as finding the nearest match: `$text = "fanny farmer from: big sky";` [download] There's no trivial way to say "a string of text that doesn't contain FROM" in Perl 4 regex. There are many wrong ways that people attempt. :) -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply] [d/l]
RE: how to express $temp =~ s/.*?from://; in perl 4 by Anonymous Monk on Jul 31, 2000 at 08:27 UTC
What site are you gonna be running this on? I want to take advantage of your Perl 4 stupidity and destroy everything on the site.	[reply]