Re:x2 Inserting numbers between parenthese matches in regexp

I'm curious. Question of style, why the square braces as delimiters? There are no slashes in what is matched, so there's no problem regarding leaning toothpicks.

I had to think for an extra second or two to figure out what you were doing, which in fact is quite clever. Bear with me, I want to see what this looks like:

s/(?<=[a-m])(?=[n-z])/5/g;

I dunno, somehow that seems clearer to me. I think it is because otherwise I find my eyes skipping back and forward too much between the character classes and the s-op delimiters. (But ++ all the same, I'll keep this technique in mind).

- another intruder with the mooring of the heat of the Perl

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Re^2: x2 Inserting numbers between parenthese matches in regexp by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Jun 27, 2004 at 22:03 UTC
Basically, I got fed up with writing some regexes and substitutions with /s and then having to choose a different delimiter to avoid leaning toothpicks, then a different delimiter somewhere else to avoid conflicts with the fiorst choice and so on. Then I discovered that using balanced delimiters meant that I rarely had to switch delimiters. Of the choices, () are just too common in regex, {} look like code blocks and are also used in regex. I tried <> for a while, and they are a pretty good choice, but of the four, despite that they are themselves fairly common in regex, I found that I preferred `[]`. So I now use them for all my regexes. I think I only encountered one time when I had problems with using them and that waas in a monster regex attempting to parse XML. Historically, I am a strong believer in consistancy, and being able to use the same delimiter for all my regex (and other quote-like constructs) just makes my code more self-consistant. Personally, I can't wait for characters to become consistantly 32-bits. Not only would that do away with the variable byte-length encoding problem that comes from utf and the performance hit that entails, but it gives more than enough space in the character set to introduce a dozen or so more sets of balanced pairs that would allieviate much of this type of problem completely. I noticed that Bob Bemer, the father of ASCIIdied recently. Maybe it's time to let ASCII go to and invent a completely new set of symbols for computing:) Examine what is said, not who speaks. "Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham "Think for yourself!" - Abigail "Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algoritm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re^2: x2 Inserting numbers between parenthese matches in regexp
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Jun 27, 2004 at 22:03 UTC

Basically, I got fed up with writing some regexes and substitutions with /s and then having to choose a different delimiter to avoid leaning toothpicks, then a different delimiter somewhere else to avoid conflicts with the fiorst choice and so on.

Then I discovered that using balanced delimiters meant that I rarely had to switch delimiters. Of the choices, () are just too common in regex, {} look like code blocks and are also used in regex.

I tried <> for a while, and they are a pretty good choice, but of the four, despite that they are themselves fairly common in regex, I found that I preferred []. So I now use them for all my regexes. I think I only encountered one time when I had problems with using them and that waas in a monster regex attempting to parse XML.

Historically, I am a strong believer in consistancy, and being able to use the same delimiter for all my regex (and other quote-like constructs) just makes my code more self-consistant.

Personally, I can't wait for characters to become consistantly 32-bits. Not only would that do away with the variable byte-length encoding problem that comes from utf and the performance hit that entails, but it gives more than enough space in the character set to introduce a dozen or so more sets of balanced pairs that would allieviate much of this type of problem completely.

I noticed that Bob Bemer, the father of ASCIIdied recently. Maybe it's time to let ASCII go to and invent a completely new set of symbols for computing:)

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
"Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algoritm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon

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