Don't get me wrong, regexes have their place in perl. It's part of what makes perl perl. However, I think that people have the tendency to look at every problem as a regex problem (or more generically as <insert your favorite paradigm here> problem). And, when that happens, you have people writing unnecessarily complex regexen to make the square peg fit in to the round hole. In this case, the OP had a problem where s/he had a delimited record format. If that doesn't scream split, I'll eat my hat. But, the OP had a predisposition towards using regexen at the detriment of not only readability but simplicity.

Also, I take issue (though not on a personal level) with saying that something has to be done in a certain way. Not only are you working to the exclusion of other, possibly better tools, but in some cases, your chosen tool doesn't even make sense.

thor

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

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