Dear fellow monks,

I have a problem with qw, one of my favorite little perl tools.

Like all our good friends, the better you know them, the more little things that get on your nerves and the more you want to change them for the better!

Other monks have meditated on qw before , here is a replacement for it! :)

I want to have it ignore everything after a # sign on a line, i have a big ol' qw and want to comment one element out. What a pain!

Also it would be nice to explicitly create an undef, newline or \r element and not have it as a string.

Maybe it would look like this : 

{
  my %translate =(
                '\n'=>"\n",
                '\r'=>"\r",
                '\t'=>"\t"
                );
  my $regex=join "|", map { quotemeta $_ } keys %translate; 
  sub myqw 
    {
      local $_ = shift;
      s/\#.+//g;                # bye bye comments
      return  map { 
        if ($_ eq '\undef') { 
          undef;                # undef element in the array
        } else {
          s/($regex)/$translate{$1}/ge; # safer than eval
          $_; 
        }
      } split " ";
    }
}
# test it 
print join "|", 
myqw (q[
this is a set of words # and they are commented as well
a
b
b\t\te # b tab tab e
c
# d # remove d because we wont need it
e\ne # e newline e
g
\undef
h
]);
__END__
this|is|a|set|of|words|a|b|b        e|c|e
e|g||h

[download]
thanks to demerphq in advance for the review (and lots of tips) on the post!

Edit: chipmunk 2001-11-09

In reply to qw comments by mdupont

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