"how to make this conditional, either hyphen (-) or I want to say en dash(–)?"

Just replace the single hyphen in your regex with a character class containing all possible dashes, hyphens, etc. In the character class, always put an ASCII hyphen as the last character or you'll generate a range. See perlrecharclass and, in particular, the "Bracketed Character Classes" section for much more detailed information.

An example script follows but, first, some notes:

#!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; use open OUT => qw{:encoding(UTF-8) :std}; my ($en_dash, $em_dash) = ("\x{2013}", "\N{EM DASH}"); my $str = "a-b${en_dash}c${em_dash}d"; my $re = qr{[\N{EN DASH}\x{2014}-]}; print "Original string: $str\n"; print "Parts separated by some dash:\n"; print "$_\n" for split $re, $str;

Output:

Original string: a-b–c—d Parts separated by some dash: a b c d

Because the hyphen and dashes are not easily distinguishable, here's the same output piped through cat -vet. Don't worry too much if you don't understand the codes; just notice that they are different.

$ ./pm_11137036_re_alt_dashes.pl | cat -vet Original string: a-bM-bM-^@M-^ScM-bM-^@M-^Td$ Parts separated by some dash:$ a$ b$ c$ d$

See also these Unicode® resources: the PDF "Code Chart: General Punctuation -- Range: 2000–206F"; and, for characters referenced therein but not in that range, "Unicode 14.0 Character Code Charts" (note the "Find chart by hex code:" near the top of the page).

— Ken


In reply to Re^3: Parsing/regex help required by kcott
in thread Parsing/regex help required by Anonymous Monk

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