I am not clearly explaining this issue.. Your examples are not exactly detailing my criteria because I am not fully explaining my problem, I apologize.

I have a string of characters that use the same delimiter. Some of the fields are mandatory, some are optional, and some may be repeated infinitely. I want to extract those values AND validate the fields all at once within a single regular expression. I want these values to be available to me afterward. A simple example.. 


use Data::Dumper;

my $foo = "one,123,a s d f,a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h";
my @bar = $foo =~ /^([a-z]{3}),([0-9]{3}),([a-z\s]{1,7}),(?:([a-z]),|(
+[a-z]$)){1,}/;

print Dumper(\@bar);

[download]

Consider everything after the 3rd element to repeat, possibly to infinity, but we need to make sure they are single characters, otherwise I want the entire regex to fail immediately.

Again, thank you for your time, you have spent more than enough time working with me, and I very much so appreciate it..

In reply to Re: (jeffa) 5Re: More Variable length regex issues by dextius
in thread More Variable length regex issues by dextius

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