Newbie regex question

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

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Re: Newbie regex question by vroom (His Eminence) on Feb 04, 2000 at 03:02 UTC
I'll just offer a bit of commentary on the above regex we have to escape the $ with a \ to get \$ so the Perl interpreter won't expect a variable there instead of the literal $. Then we do (.?) This does a non-greedy match of . (basically anything besides newline) 0 or more times... the question mark makes the previous repeater non-greedy which means it'll match as few characters as it can while still matching your regexp. Then we saw we want to match \ again we escaped because * is a special character and we want it 3 ({3}) of them. The stuff between your first set of parentheses is in $1 so there ya go.	[reply]
RE: Newbie regex question by Anonymous Monk on Feb 05, 2000 at 03:53 UTC
Regexp is a many spendored thing, however it is a bit arcane. Since your example has symbols in it things are a little harder. Especially since $ and * are wild cards in regexp. I use your example to illustrate with. `$text = q"'$' and '**'"; $text =~ /\$(.)\\\/; print $1;` [download] This yeilds: ' and ' The trick is to escape the $ and with a \ (backslash). The q in front of the quotes may look like a typo, but it saves me from having to use a lot of backslashes. Speaking of which, there is a way to not use so many backslashes in our pattern. `$text =~ /\$(.)\{3}/;` [download] This has the same effect. The regexp is more compact as well. The {} allows me to say how many of the last character to match. 2001-03-11 Edited by Corion: Added CODE tags	[reply] [d/l] [select]
RE: Newbie regex question by Anonymous Monk on Feb 05, 2000 at 21:08 UTC
You'd want to do /\$.?\\\/, assuming you wanted the regexp to be non-greed, and match the first set of *** it finds, rather than the last.	[reply]
RE: Newbie regex question by Anonymous Monk on Oct 04, 2000 at 01:23 UTC
opps, looks like i used ; at the end of the elsif. i am such a dumbass. sorry	[reply]
Re: Newbie regex question by mortis (Pilgrim) on Feb 04, 2000 at 02:44 UTC
something like: `$text =~ /\$(.?)\{3}/; $stuff = $1;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]