Hi monks,

I'm hoping someone can help me/teach me about regex's. I can do basic ones but i'm trying to do something and it's got me quite stumped.
Best way to describe it is with an example so here we go:
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my @full_authors = ( "Smith, John", "Smith, John Ronald", "Johnson, Ja
+mes", "James, Ray Jack", "Van der Burg, Jon", "O'Neil, Sarah" );
my @authors = ( "Smith J", "Jackson J", "James RJ", "Van der Burg J", 
+"O'Neil S" );

# Results should be:
# Smith J = Smith, John
# Jackson J = Jackson J
# James RJ = James, Ray Jack
# Van der Burg J = Van der Burg, Jon
# O'Neil S = O'Neil, Sarah

foreach my $author (@authors) {

        print "$author = ";

        # Regex rules
        # Last ' ' before all-uppercase word should become ', '
        # Every singular or grouped capital letter
        # (i.e. F or RJ) should become F(.*) or R(.*) J(.*)

        # What I have so far
        $author =~ s/ (\w+?)\p{IsUpper}/, $1\(\.*\)/;
        print "[ $author ] : ";

        if ( my ($match) = ( grep $_ =~ /$author/, @full_authors ) ) {
                $author = $match;
                @full_authors = grep { $_ ne $match } @full_authors;
        } # end-if

        print "$author\n";

} # end-foreach

exit;

[download]
Any help anyone could provide would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Reagen

In reply to regex help by rsiedl

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