What does "golf OK" mean?

I would not accomplish this via a regexp because using a hash is much easier. It is not an overly complex regex, but it takes patience and attention to detail to maintain. Assuming we want to match A000, A123-A456, A999-B000, B789-B888 inclusively, I would run the following code with:

prompt> matchrange.pl | more 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

foreach ('A000' .. 'B999') {
  print "$_  ";
  if (/^(?:
          A(?:000|12[3-9]|1[3-9]\d|[2-3]\d\d|4[0-4]\d|45[0-6]|999)
          |
          B(?:000|789|79\d|8[0-7]\d|88[0-8])
        )$/x) {
    print "match\n";
  } else {
    print "does not match\n";
  }
}

[download]
The code could be optimized more by adding grouping non-remembering parentheses for A around the 100 section and "factoring" out the 1 and around the 400 section and "factoring" out the 4 and for B around the 700s and 800s. I decided not to do this because it would hamper maintainability and comprehensibility.

Furthermore, each alternative should be inserted left to right from largest range covered to smallest range. Hence, for A the 000 and 999 should come last; whereas the 200-399 range should come first. However, this makes the regex harder to read. I decided to keep the alternates in numerical order.

I would use a hash if the dataset were not too big (large being relative to the amount of RAM you have):

my %match;
my @num = ('A000','A123'..'A456','A999','B000','B789'..'B888');
@match{ @num } = ();

foreach my $key('A000' .. 'B999') {
  print "$key  ";
  if ( exists $match{$key} ) {
    print "match\n";
  } else {
    print "does not match\n";
  }
}

[download]

In reply to Regex is possible but I prefer a hash. by Anonymous Monk
in thread Need Set-like Regex for Perl and Java (golf OK) by QM

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