in reply to String replacement with regex...

ishnid beat me to it, so here's a nifty "simplification":

$bar =~ s/varchar\s*\((\d+)(??{$1<256})\)/TEXT/i;

update: I suppose it would be helpful to regex novices to give an explanation of the above:

The (??{ code }) construct (note: see the warning about this in perlre) evaluates the code inside the brackets, and treats the results as if it were part of the regex. If the number captured by (\d+) is less than 256, it returns a 1. The parser then tries to match on that 1 and fails, since the \d+ already sucked up all the digits.

If the number is 256 or greater, the expression returns a blank string (not 0), so the regex matches.

See perlre and perlretut for all the gory details.

Brad

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Re^2: String replacement with regex...
by amonotod (Acolyte) on Aug 06, 2004 at 16:15 UTC
    Okay, so I thought it was working, and it is... But too expansively.

    Using
    $buffer =~ s/varchar\s*\((\d+)(??{$1<256})\)/TEXT/i;
    as my replacement function, I'm getting conversions on this column, for some reason...

    Discrepancy_Filename VARCHAR (40) NULL
    becomes
    Discrepancy_Filename TEXT NULL

    Ideas?
    Thanks,
    amonotod

      Odd...it works fine for me. Would it be possible for you to post a snippet of code that shows it not working?

      Brad

Re^2: String replacement with regex...
by Gilimanjaro (Hermit) on Aug 06, 2004 at 15:24 UTC
    Or if using (??) is not desired:
    $bar =~ s/varchar\s*\(\d|\d\d|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])\)/TEXT/i;
    Or split up for readbility:
    $byte = qr/\d|\dd|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5]/; $bar =~ s/varchar\s*\($byte)\)/TEXT/i;
      If I read it correctly, that's backwards, matching numbers less than or equal to 255 instead of numbers strictly greater than 255. (The post you're replying to was doing very clever things with truth and falsehood.)
        You're right... Oops...