Hello tj999, and welcome to the Monastery!

Just to elaborate on tybalt89’s ++answer: the key here is the use of a positive lookahead assertion. Like other lookaround assertions, this is zero-width, so it is ignored when the regex engine is working out where to start looking for the next match during a global search (i.e., when the regex is in list context and has a /g modifier). Here are some references on lookahead assertions:

• “Lookaround Assertions” under perlre#Extended-Patterns
• Using Look-ahead and Look-behind
• Lookahead assertion
• Positive lookbehind and lookahead confusion (showing where lookaround assertions are not needed)

BTW, note that tybalt89’s solution omits the final comma from the regex. With the comma included, your regex will not match the 999 in a string such as 123,222,456,222,222,111,222,999.

Update 1: An illustration may make things clearer. Say your search string is "222,222,111", and the regex is /222,(\d\d\d)/g. The regex engine begins its search at the first character:

222,222,111
^
=======  <-- 1st match: 222,222  Capture: 222
[download]

and finds a match. Then the search for the next match begins at the character immediately following the end of the previous match:

222,222,111
       ^
[download]

Not finding a match here, it moves forward one character:

222,222,111
        ^
[download]

and finds no match; and so on, one character at a time, to the end of the string.

But if the regex has a lookahead assertion, /222,(?=(\d\d\d))/g, the search for a second match again begins one character beyond the end of the previous match, but this time the lookahead assertion itself is not counted as a part of that match, so the regex engine starts looking here:

222,222,111
    ^
    =======  <-- 2nd match: 222,111  Capture: 111
[download]

— and finds the second match. Note that the lookahead assertion has actually effectively¹ shifted the regex search back by 3 characters, not 4 as implied by the title of this thread: a small point, but perhaps useful in helping to clarify what is going on.

Updates 2 & 3: Re-wrote Update 1 to fix various errors.

¹Update 4: As AnomalousMonk notes, it would be more accurate “to say that a zero-width assertion does not move the search position at all, even if it captures.”

Hope that helps,

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.