This is a rather complex task. What have you tried so far?

The basic tools would be

  • a pattern that splits a line into a head (AAA BBC DAL33) and a tail (the final number or single character used for pairing). This could be used: my( $head, $tail) = /^(.+?)(\d+|[[:alpha:]])$/; though your description allows for alternatives.

  • One or more hashes to organize the data in a way that the pairings can easily be extracted.

    • Here is one way to do it: 

    my (%num, %alpha);
while ( <DATA> ) {
    chomp;
    my ( $head, $tail) = /^(.+?)(\d+|[[:alpha:]])$/;
    if ( $tail =~ /^\d+$/ ) {
        $num{ $head}->{ $tail} = $_;
    } else {
        $alpha{ $head}->{ ord $tail} = $_;
    }
}
my @pairs = (
    map( extract_pairs( $_) => values %num),
    map( extract_pairs( $_) => values %alpha),
);

print "$_\n" for @pairs;
exit;

sub extract_pairs {
    my $h = shift;
    my @pairs;
    for ( keys %$h ) {
        for my $partner ( $_ - 1, $_ + 1 ) {
            if ( exists $h->{ $partner} ) {
                push @pairs, "$h->{ $_};$h->{ $partner}";
                delete @$h{ $_, $partner};
            }
        }
    }
    @pairs;
}

__DATA__
AAA30
BBC5
SHT12H
DAL33B
BBC49
AAA31
DAL33A
BBC6
SHT12G
BBC50

    [download]
    This code will ignore singletons for which a pairing partner cannot be found. If there are more than two consecutive pairs for a single head, say if you had BBC7 besides BBC5 and BBC6 the bevavior is undefined. It will pick some pair(s) and may ignore others.

    Anno

    In reply to Re: searching for strings by Anno
    in thread searching for strings by steph_bow

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