Greetings Monks,

My regex won't let me do what I want. My goal is to build a compression on a string of digits. I only want to transform patterns of exactly 4 times a 3. I want it to count as many as matches as possible,
count the amount of occurence and for example change it to [ 4 ] or [ 8 ] or [ 12 ] and so on. This must sound very confusing, my example should clear things up. So for example, i have a var I need to transform:

my $toTranslate = "3333333333223333322";

I would like the output to become:
[ 8 ] 3322[ 4 ] 322

The script I made so far looks like this:

#!/usr/str/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;

my $toTranslate ="3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
+333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333332333
+333333223333333332333333333333333333333333333333333233333333223333333
+32333333333";
my $tmpFound;
my $count = 0;

while($toTranslate =~ /(3{4,})+/g) {
    $tmpFound = $1;
    $tmpFound = length($tmpFound);

    $toTranslate =~ s/$1/[$tmpFound]/;
}

print $toTranslate,"\n";

[download]


Output: [ 117 ] 2 [ 9 ] 22 [ 9 ] 2 [ 33 ] 2 [ 8 ] 22 [ 8 ] 2 [ 9 ]

The problem here though is the {4,} being ATLEAST 4 times, so it replaces "3333322" to "[ 5 ] 22".

When I make it: $toTranslate =~ /(3{4})+/g)
I face the next problem, it will store the data on exact matches, and the output will look like [ 4 ] [ 4 ] [ 4 ] 33222[ 4 ] [ 4 ] for example.

Do any of you Monks have a clue how to adjust this regex so that it will give me an output like " [ 80 ] 322[ 36 ] 23323332" etc.?

P.S. I want this done by a regex and not for example a function that calculates the output.

Kind regards,
Joris

In reply to Regex exact pattern match problem! by Jts

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