Dear Monks,
I am new to PERL and hope you can help me with a regex question.

What I want is to find the largest integer in each string. The following are two example of the strings that I am currenly working on:

ASBSDEC 34 GADVVEEVEETTE 56 IOEOREAK GKJEOG EFEAF 1090 DAFFEE 376

ASB C 134 PPKOREAK EFEAF 290

So, I want the number 1090 for the first string, 290 for the second. As I got thousands of such strings, I don't know how many integers there are in each string (some string could be extremely long with more than 100 integers in it.

I wonder if there is any way to read the integers one by one: get first integer as $var, then go to the second integer and compare that with $var, if larger then replace $var, otherwise, go ahead with the third integer, repeat until the last integer in the string.

I tried some thing like /\d+?/g, but it does not seem to be working. :(

I really appreciate it if you can help me out here.

BTW, to be a bit more complex, is there any way I can get the text before each integer using $'?

In reply to Help with regex, how to get the largest integer in a string? by coltman

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