Wow! That's the first triple negative I've seen in the wild in a long time:)

You code reads:

Print "non-digits found" if $str doesn't match things that are not non-digits!

Try: print '"non digits found" if $str contains non-digits. (It's easier for a human being to read:)

print 'non digits found' if $str =~ /\D/;
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Note: Using /g in the scalar context of an if statement is probably superfluous.

Using /g in the scalar context of an if statement is probably superfluous.

s/superfluous/a mistake/. //g in a scalar context can make your match fail every so often. I've seen this type of bug reported here several times.

This particular code, in isolation, probably wouldn't notice the bug (perhaps that is what you meant) since $str appears to be getting updated at least once per regex application. But the use of //g in a scalar context is something that should be vigorously avoided unless you need that advanced magic and understand it.

I've seen this mistake enough that I'd support a pragma that makes this illegal unless you ask for it. But, in practice, I don't see how to make such useful.

                - tye

Yes, I probably should have stated it more strongly.

I have been bitten by this a few times which is why it stood out at me. I didn't have enough confidence to say the it was always, or even nearly always a mistake without thinking it through further. I know that I have used it to good effect at least once, hence the prevarication.

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -Richard Buckminster Fuller
If I understand your problem, I can solve it! Of course, the same can be said for you.

my $$$a = \\$b;
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just because you can.

And there's no need to put \D in a character class. It is, itself, a character class. Only put it in a character class if you intend to also add other things to it.

And though /g is useful in many situations (even in Scalar context), it's not helping you here because you're simply looking for a nondigit somewhere in the string. Regular expressions look through the whole string automatically, for one instance of a match, and return true as soon as they find that instance. If you had a situation where you cared about multiple matches, you would use /g, but you only want to reject the string if it contains one or more. You don't really care about the "or more" part. One is enough to be a problem, so just get rid of the /g; it wasn't working for you in that example anyway.

So after all's said and done, your code should look like this:

my $match = '\D';
print "non digits found\n" if $str =~ $match;
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Hope this helps!

Dave

"If I had my life to do over again, I'd be a plumber." -- Albert Einstein

use Regexp::Common;
$str =~ /$RE{num}{real}/;
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