Hi,

Ok, let me see if I can explain myself :)

Basically, if we have a string like;

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

...we them split this up into sections, like: 

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting indus
+try. Lorem Ipsum 

has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since 

the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled
+ it to make a type 

specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the l
+eap into electronic 

typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in th
+e 1960s with the 

release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more r
+ecently with desktop 

publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem I
+psum.

[download]


Now, for some of those phrases, we wanna remove anything before any of these charachters:

! , . : and )

For example, this:

typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the

..would become:

remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the

Now, I've got a function that does this: 

sub cleanup_start_words {

    my $text = $_[0];

    my @split = split //, $text;
    my @keywords = split //, $_[1];


    return $text;
    
    # see if we have any charachters we wanna skip in the first 10 cha
+rachters
    my $remove_at;
    my $do_remove = 0;
    for (my $x = 0; $x < 40; $x++) {
        if ($split[$x] =~ /[\.\!\?,\)\:\:]/) {    
            $do_remove = 1;
            $remove_at = $x;
        }
    }

    

    if ($do_remove) {

        my $i = 0;
        foreach (@split) {            
            $i++;
            if ($i > $remove_at) { last; }
            if (m/[\.\!\?,]\)\:/) {                
#                print "skipping [last] $_ \n";
                last;
            } else {
#                print "skipping $_ \n";                
            }
        }

     # didn't seem to work right when doing it in the foreach above, s
+o get rid of the 
     # charachters we dont want here
        for (my $ii = 0; $ii < $i; $ii++) {
            shift @split;
        }

        my $tmp = join("",@split);
           $tmp =~ s/^[\.\!\?,\)\:]//;
           $tmp =~ s/^\s+//;

        return $tmp;

    } else {
        return $text;
    }

}

[download]


..but I'm wondering if there is maybe a regex we could use, which would be more effecient?

I'm trying to knock of crutial miliseconds from this, cos the new feature has added about .1 of a second to each request (it doesn't only consist of the above code - there is a lot else going on =))

Anyone got any suggestions? Please note, this is a non-english site, so will need to work with accented charachters etc.

TIA!

Andy

In reply to Way to "trim" part of a phrase? by ultranerds

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