in reply to Re: Re: Global regex giving up too soon
in thread Global regex giving up too soon

So basically, I guess there is no way to get /g to look over the entire regex,
What do you mean by "looking over the entire regex"? /g means "match repeatedly (without overlap)".

Abigail

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Re: Re: Global regex giving up too soon
by Wassercrats (Initiate) on Jan 20, 2004 at 11:38 UTC
    Well, does it make sense that there is a substitution made in more than one iteration of my loop, but if I use the regex alone, there are fewer (only one) substitutions made?
[reply]
      Yes, of course. Consider: 
      #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;  
use warnings;

my $str = "1" x 5;

$_ = $str;
print "Single s///g:\n";
print "Before: [$_]; ";
s/1(1+)/$1/g;
print "After [$_]\n";

$_ = $str;
print "Loop s///:\n";
while (1) {
    print "Before: [$_]; "; 
    last unless s/1(1+)/$1/;
    print "After: [$_]\n";
}
print "\n";

__END__
Single s///g:
Before: [11111]; After [1111]
Loop s///:
Before: [11111]; After: [1111]
Before: [1111]; After: [111]
Before: [111]; After: [11]
Before: [11]; After: [1]
Before: [1];

      [download]

      Abigail

[reply]
[d/l]
        Thanks for the demo. I better review all my uses of /g. Why does it bother me that there isn't a modifier that could replace the loop in these cases? Probably because I could use one, and because there are so many other shortcuts in Perl.
[reply]

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