Your problem is in the very first line of that regex. The dollar in ^\[$ does not match a newline. It matches right before the newline. So, that newline goes into your $1 captured by (.*) with the /s modifier. In your second substitution (the one in the eval'd part of the first one), that caret (^) will match the begining of the first line in $1 which, in your case, contains a single newline.

You can fix it by telling your regex to match an opening brace and then match as much whitespace as possible. Try changing ^\[$ to ^\[\s*.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

Try changing ^\[$ to ^\[\s*.

I don't know if the following is valid:

$string = '
[foobar]
[
this is a list
of things
that are in a list
]
blah blah later after-list text
';
[download]

but my guess is that if it is valid then i doubt the change sauoq suggested will return the wanted results. what you probably want is to change ^\[$ to ^\[\s*?\n (where then the [ can only be followed by "optional whitespace" and then a newline.)

-enlil

use CGI::Pretty qw(ol li);

my $string = "yadda\n[yadda\nyadda]yadda\n";

$string =~ s/\[\s*([^\]]+)\]/ol li[split "\n+",$1]/eg;
[download]

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

s{(?mx:
    # Explicitly set /mx for this scope. This puts the modifiers right
+ up where they are being used instead of at the end of the regex.
    ^\[$
       ((?s:.*?)) # Non-greedy match of multiple lines
    ^\]$
  )}{
    my $tmp = $1;
    $tmp =~ s{^([^\n]+)$}{<li>$1</li>}mg; # Added /m and fixed closing
+ bracket. Preferred [^\n] to . for explictness.
    "<ul>$tmp</ul>"
}eg;
[download]

Thanks all of you. I think sauoq gets top points for explaining where my thinking had gone wrong, but all of the solutions seemed fine.

In case you're not familiar with this kind of magic-first-char syntax, by the way, it's used in the online message board WebCrossing.

It's known as "quick-edit" and allows you to write

this is
i italic
text
[download]

or

this is
b bold
text
[download]

or

this is
> indented
text
[download]

in the textarea box, which saves time and is userfriendly for non-HTML people. I got so used to it I couldn't live without it and sometimes find myself doing it in other applications!

I'm trying to "embrace and extend" the syntax for my own purposes. Theirs doesn't use multi-line syntax at all.


---




“Every bit of code is either naturally related to the problem at hand, or else it's an accidental side effect of the fact that you happened to solve the problem using a digital computer.”
M-J D

artist