Taking one wild guess, which could be totally off, because I can think of about three or four things you might mean, let's say you want to grab all the items that are comma-delimited inside the parens:

$string = "blah blah (name 1, name 2, name 3 and name 4), blah blah (n
+ame 1, name 2, name 3 and name 4)";
@items = map { split /,\*/ } $string =~ /\((.*?)\)/g;
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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

@items = map { split /,\*/ } $string =~ /\((.*?)\)/g;

Tsk. And after Ovid and you went through the rounds in Death to Dot Star!

(although I don't know which is actually faster)

s# ([(][^)]*[)]) # my $x=$1; $x =~ s/,/;/g; $x #xeg
[download]

Update: I added the "; $x" that I originally left out. It makes me long for an extra modifier for s/// that copies the string before modifying it and then returns the modified string. It would be perfect for use with map.

Sorry for the vagueness

I want to substitute them for something other than a comma

Orthanc

Sorry for the hassle guys
I'm a bit rushed today

Start String
team 1 (name, name, name and name), team 2 (name, name, name and blah)

End String
team 1 (name; name; name and name), team 2 (name; name; name and blah)

Hope this helps :)

Orthanc

Ahh... tye just left out one thing:

s# ([(][^)]*[)]) # my $x=$1; $x =~ s/,/;/g ; $x #xeg
[download]

That should work. Although I'd probably write that as:

s{ 
  \( 
  (.*?) 
  \) 
}{ 
  my $x = $1; 
  $x =~ tr/,/;/; 
  $x;
}gsex;
[download]

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Big Thanks to all that helped, much appreciated. I was pulling my hair out :)

Orthanc

Tye

Your nice regex doesn't seem to work for me

Orthanc

We've been trying to help you. Give us an example of a "start string", and an "end string".

Your specifications can only leave us wondering.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker