Re: RegEx Beginning of line or whitespace match

Typically, the word boundary anchor \b works well in these cases:

    if($line =~ /\bfor\(/) { 
       # ...
    }
[download]

It will also match "(for(" and ";for(" which is a very common requirement for parsing programming languages. Speaking of which, if you are trying to parse perl or parts of it, check out PPI.

Comment on Re: RegEx Beginning of line or whitespace match Select or Download Code

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Re^2: RegEx Beginning of line or whitespace match by THRAK (Monk) on Feb 11, 2005 at 21:46 UTC
See, I knew this wasn't as difficult to the level I was struggling with it. This works, because I forgot two additional test cases...that being that this could be anywhere in the line, not just at the beginning with or without spaces. e.g. `$line = 'could be anything here some_for($var)'; #don't match $line = 'could be anything here for($var)'; #match` [download] Thanks. -THRAK www.polarlava.com	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: RegEx Beginning of line or whitespace match by CountZero (Bishop) on Feb 11, 2005 at 22:50 UTC
In other words: match if for( begins at a word boundary, don't match in all other cases: `m/\b(for\()/` PS: you can drop the parentheses if you don't want to extract anything and only want to test for matches. CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply] [d/l]