Re: Excluding groups of characters in regular expressions

You'd be better off treating this more as a parser problem than a regexp problem, because trying to match nested items in regexp is advanced stuff... here is some code that should get you started... not ideal but easy :)

$text = "<paragraph>some <paragraph>some data</paragraph>data</paragra
+ph><paragraph>more data</paragraph><paragraph>even more data</paragra
+ph>";

my $depth = 0;
$text =~ s{(<(/)?paragraph>)}{check($depth)}gie;

print "$text\n";

sub check {
    if($2) {
        $_[0]--;
        if($_[0] == 0) {
            return $1;
        }
        $_[0] = 0 if $_[0] < 0;
    } else {
        $_[0]++;
        return $1 if $_[0] == 1;
    }
    return '';
}
[download]

- Ant
- Some of my best work - (1 2 3)

Comment on Re: Excluding groups of characters in regular expressions Download Code

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Re^2: Excluding groups of characters in regular expressions by semirhage (Initiate) on Dec 21, 2007 at 16:19 UTC
A friend of mine was able to help me... here is the answer for anybody who needs help with this sort of thing in the future. `$_='$0<paragraph>$1<paragraph>$2</paragraph>$3<paragraph>$4<paragraph> +$5</paragraph>$6</paragraph>$7</paragraph>$8<paragraph>$9</paragraph> +$10<paragraph>$11</paragraph>$12 '; ($re=$_)=~s/((<paragraph>)\|(<\/paragraph>)\|[^<]+\|.)/${[')','']}[!$3]\Q +$1\E${['(','']}[!$2]/gs; $re=join"\|",map{quotemeta}(eval{/$re/}); s{($re)}{local $_=$1;s#</?paragraph>##g;$_}eg; print;` [download] Tom	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Excluding groups of characters in regular expressions by suaveant (Parson) on Dec 21, 2007 at 19:52 UTC
Have you ever heard anyone discussing your friend's code before... and if so, was there a lot of swearing involved? No offense, but the code looks like an entry to an obfuscation contest. Not so bad if its a one off script, but barely maintainable if it's going to be around for a bit. - Ant - Some of my best work - (1 2 3)	[reply]