Hi Monks,

I am trying to get a very basic script to print out the matches from two regular expressions at once. Specifically, I am trying to print out all of the numbers (digits) and all of the words in between a "#" and the word "fin" in .txt files which take the following format: 

The 2 cats and the dog.
The 8 cats and the 6 dogs.
The 3 pigs and the 2 sheep.

#story fin #cats and dogs fin #sheep fin

[download]

So, for example, from the above file, I would expect the output to be: 

2
8
6
3
2
story
cats and dogs
sheep

[download]

At the moment, I am using the following script: 

open(FILE, 'C:\Users\li\perl\animals.txt');  
$/ = " ";
while (<FILE>) {
    if (m/((\d)+?)|((?<=#)(.*?)(?= fin))/g) {
        print "$1\n";
}
        
}

[download]

However, while this returns the numbers, it does not return the desired words. I believe that my mistake is using the | operator, which I think is telling the script to finish becuase it has found the first part of the regex and doesn't need to continue for the rest?

A google search suggested that lookaheads could be used in a way that mirrors an "and" operator:  (?=.*word1)(?=.*word2)(?=.*word3) (http://www.ocpsoft.org/tutorials/regular-expressions/and-in-regex/) However, the following regex, created using the lookaheads suggested above, returns no results for me 

 
open(FILE, 'C:\Users\li\perl\animals.txt');  
$/ = " ";
while (<FILE>) {
    if (m/(?=.*((\d)+?))(?=.*((?<=#)(.*?)(?= fin)))/g) {
        print "$1\n";
}
        
}

[download]

I also read about using Smart Match How do I efficiently match many regular expressions at once?. However, when I run the following script, the only thing that appears is a notification that "Smartmatch is experimental at C:\Users\li\perl\animalscript2.pl line 3." 


open(FILE, 'C:\Users\li\perl\animals.txt');  
    my @patterns = ( qr/((\d)+)/, qr/((?<=#)(.*?)(?= fin))/);
    if( $string ~~ @patterns ) {
        print "$1\n";
    };

[download]

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

In reply to Printing out matches for two regular expressions by Maire

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