My thanks to everyone who wrote back on this--I finally figured it out.

$OPand was set to '\s+', as this was how the input string is set. This is also why I was using \s*?, believing it would capture any whitespace in the case of the $OPor or $OPnot separators. However, perl was evaluating "blah, blah2" and returning $1 = 'blah,', $2 = ' ', and $3 = 'blah2'. The reason I erroneously assumed the regexp was destroying 'blah2' is the script loops, evaluating $1 as the test string. The handler for ($2 =~ /^\s+$/) was written incorrectly, so the script just skipped over the first iteration. It worked on the second iteration, however, evaluating "blah,", and thus finding $1 = "blah", $2 = ",", and $3 = "".

Again, thanks for the pointers--they definitely helped me figure out what I'd done incorrectly.

In reply to Re: Regexp oddity by daemon23
in thread Regexp oddity by daemon23

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.