RE: Regular Expression Question - Having problems with anchors

TASdvlper has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hey all,

In the code below, I'm trying to set up two different array, (@testtype and @testsuite), well the problem is "Base Functionality" is ending up in the testtype array and not the testsuite array (it's matching 'Functionality' in the regexp). I want these to be exact matches and not partial matches.

I've tried using "^ and $" in the parenthesis and outside but nothing seems to work. I'm sure this is a easy fix, I just can't seem to get a handle on it.

Thank in advance.

if ( $q->param($_) ne "" )   {
          if ( /(Smoke|Integration|Functional|Non-Functional|Regressio
+n|New)/ )   {
             push (@testtype, $param) if ( $q->param($_) eq "yes" );
          }
          elsif ( /(Base Functionality|\(4\) DPC|Boot Support|Clones|L
+ow Priority|Clusters|Data Mobility|Host Based Applications|Performanc
+e|Scalability)/ )   {
             push (@testsuite, $param) if ( $q->param($_) eq "yes" );
          }
          else  {
             $myhash{$param} = $q->param($_);
             $myhash{$param} =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//g;
          }
       }
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Comment on RE: Regular Expression Question - Having problems with anchors Download Code

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Re^2: Regular Expression Question - Having problems with anchors by sauoq (Abbot) on Sep 30, 2005 at 18:30 UTC
You are pushing `$param` onto your array but you are testing `$_` in your regular expressions. As there isn't anyway to tell from the code you've posted what is actually in `$param`, it's hard to give advice. I can tell you that putting your anchors outside your parens will give you the behavior you want from your regex. (i.e. `/^(a\|b\|c)$/` will match only the exact strings: `'a'` or `'b'` or `'c'` update: or any of those strings with a newline appended.) -sauoq "My two cents aren't worth a dime.";	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Regular Expression Question - Having problems with anchors by philcrow (Priest) on Sep 30, 2005 at 18:27 UTC
This is because 'Base Functionality' includes 'Functional' which is in the first list. You could reorder the if and elsif tests, but other problems of a similar kind are likely occur later. Instead you can anchor on word boundaries with \b, as in ...\|\bFunctional\b\|... Phil	[reply]
Re^3: Regular Expression Question - Having problems with anchors by sauoq (Abbot) on Sep 30, 2005 at 21:59 UTC
You can't tell that from the code provided and it is quite possibly not the issue given that he claims he tried anchors outside the parens. -sauoq "My two cents aren't worth a dime.";	[reply]