tye, I agree that your first regex would work, but I was specifically looking to see if I could use a lookbehind with a string anchor such as '^'. Your second regex, however, leaves me confused:
$test =~ s#
(?<! # Negative lookbehind
.{6} # Six of any non-newline character
)
(?<= # Positive lookbehind
[A-Z]{5} # Five caps
)
: # Here's what we're really substituting
#:</B>\n<BR><BR>#;x
In other words, we're going to substitute out a colon, but only if that is preceded by five caps, but only if the five caps in turn are not preceded by six non-newline characters. Is that what you intended? If so, was that intended as a work-around for the '^' anchor? If it was, I see a lot of problems with it.
Regardless, I'm stuck with my original question: can regex string anchors and lookbehinds be combined?
Cheers,
Ovid
Update: tye, read my commentary in addition to the regex comments and you'll see that we agree. My wording may have been odd, but it's there. :) | [reply]
[d/l] |
No, look-behinds are zero-width so the negative
look-behind says "there are not 6 (non-newline) characters
in front of the colon".
So we want a colon that has 5 caps in front of it and
that doesn't have 6 characters in front of it.
Okay, I side-stepped your question. I don't know why
^ doesn't work in look-behinds. It might be possible to
convince someone that this is a bug. But you can't convince
me of that because I refuse to patch regex code. (:
-
tye
(but my friends call me "Tye")
| [reply] |