Monks,

After spending quite a while running and re-running my program with perl -d, I finally narrowed down this problem I'm having with Text::ParseWords, whereby the comma-separated, quoted string I'm passing to parse_line doesn't get parsed (I get back an empty list).

Can someone please tell me why the following code behaves this way?

my $string = "'" . 'v' x 35_000 . "z'";
print "length of the string is: ", length($string), "\n";

my ($quote, $quoted);
($quote, $quoted) = $string =~ m/^(["'])(.*)\1/;
print "dot-star works!\n" if $quoted;

# a copy of part of the Text::ParseWords::parse_line() regex
($quote, $quoted) = $string =~ m/^(["'])((?:\\.|(?!\1)[^\\])*)\1/;
print "Text::ParseWords fails!\n" unless $quoted;

[download]

I don't know if the results are system-dependent, but If I shorten the string to 30,000 characters, the second reg-ex works, too.Is there some sort of size limit with zero-width negative look-ahead assertions or character-classes that I didn't know about?

Any ideas?

--
3dan

In reply to Text::ParseWords regex doesn't work when text is too long? by edan

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