Hello Monks, I'm a pathetic newbie trying to slog through the "Camel", with reasonable success so far. Anyway, I cannot figure out one of the examples. From the book: "The we match any number of characters with .* - but we place another code subpattern in between the . and the * so we can count how many times . matches. Here is the example:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$_ = "lothlorien";
m/ (?{ $i = 0 })
   (.   (?{ $i++ })  )*
   lori
/x;

[download]
$i=10?

So, the increment of $i is right in between the . and the quantifer, * - but $i=10? If it increments whenever the . matches, then I thought $i should be 7. The '.*' would match the whole string, then back up one at a time till the rest of the pattern could match the 'lori' part.

Can someone enlighten me?
PS. The "code sub-pattern" is zero-width; is this why it can sit in a pair of paratheses that is being quanified (by the *). This seems very weird to me. ~stratkid

In reply to code within a regular expression by stratkid

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