I want to know exactly where the pattern did not match the given line in the loop

well, everywhere.

Or to phrase it differently, the regex didn't match anywhere, so every position in the string is a position where the match failed.

So, the question is, what do you want to tell the user? That the line contained ABC but not a whitespace after it? then you need to run a second regex. Or you could presumably match a regex that always matches, and then use that to see how far you got, but it's not so easy.

Update: One can do something like 

use strict;
use warnings;

$_ = 'stuffABC Xmorestuff';
if (/((A(?:B(?:C(?:\s+(?:X(?:Y(?:Z)?)?)?)?)?)?))/) {
    print "Searched for 'ABC\\s+XYZ' but only found $1";
}

[download]

But that won't give good output in the most general case. Probably the most intuitive output is searching for the longest partial match: 

use strict;
use warnings;

$_ = 'stuAffABC XmoresABtuff';
my $longest = '';
while (/((A(?:B(?:C(?:\s+(?:X(?:Y(?:Z)?)?)?)?)?)?))/g) {
    $longest = $1 if length($1) > length($longest);
}
print "Searched for 'ABC\\s+XYZ' but only found '$longest'\n";
__END__
Searched for 'ABC\s+XYZ' but only found 'ABC X'

[download]

Note that Perl 6 has a special regex feature for constructing such regexes (<* regex that can match partially>, though nobody has implemented that yet).

Second update: I realized that it might help to explain why there isn't a good way to determine why a regex failed to match in the general case.

One must understand that a successful regex match typically is typically preceeded by quite a number of "small" failures. For example if you do a match like 'abc' =~ /.*c/, then a naive regex engine would first try to match .* against the entire string, then determines that the 'c' can't match, then backtrack, that is make .* one less character, and then the 'c' can match too. (Perl actually keeps track of the length of the regex that remains, so it's a bit smarter, but there are other cases where it can't be smart).

So if the regex .*c fails to match a string, it has tried every possible starting position within that string, and all the attempts have been unsuccessful. Which attempt should be reported as "the" unsuccessful attempt? There's no good answer to that question in the general case.

Also a regex engine would need to keep around lots of data in memory to report why stuff failed, which isn't a good idea for successful matches.

Note that if you run a program with perl -Mre=debug yourprogram.pl you'll get some information why a regex match failed, but it's not a format that would make it useful to a normal user (who isn't a programmer).

Perl 6 - second systems done right

In reply to Re: How to find where regex did not match across the line by moritz
in thread How to find where regex did not match across the line by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.