This problem has to do with the Perforce version control system, and finding the branching structure in the source archive. I am parsing the set of file merges and branches and finding the branching structure of the source archive. There could easily be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of these records that have to be parsed.

The truth is I can take a few shortcuts to make this task easier. For example, it is common practice in Perforce to put branch names in all caps, so I could really search for the first instance of m</[A-Z_]+/> and find what I'm looking for. Or, I can simply assume that the fourth set of characters between the slashes is the name of the branch because that's where it is in my particular source archive.

However, I look at this and say These are strings, I want to manipulate them, and that's what you use Perl for. There's gotta be a way to simply say "Take these two strings and snip the matching parts". Maybe not quite that simple, but you get the idea.

I'm really just looking for a Perl solution to this problem. Something that will make Python programmers weep and shell scripters green with envy.

In reply to Re^2: Selecting the difference between two strings by qazwart
in thread Selecting the difference between two strings by qazwart

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