How to deal with such strings?

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

Hello monks!
I have come up with a string in a program of mine, that has the following look:

-XXX--XXXXXXXXX...XXXXXXWW--WWW.WWWZZZ---ZZZWW..W-.-WWWWWXXX
[download]

I need to have same letters printed together, ignoring - and . (both - and . should be treated relevant to what letters are next to them).
So, the output would be:

1-24:X
25-35:W
36-44:Z
45-57:W
58-60:X
[download]

Comment on How to deal with such strings? Select or Download Code

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Re: How to deal with such strings? by Corion (Patriarch) on Jun 10, 2009 at 08:23 UTC
You haven't shown what you've already tried. The following one-liner produces the output: `>perl -lne "$l=1;while (/([-.]([\w])\2[-.](\2+[-.])*)/g){ print sp +rintf '%d-%d:s',$l,pos,$2;$l=pos()+1}"` [download] See perlre for the regular expression. You might want to specify what output should be produced for: `XXX---YYY` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How to deal with such strings? by almut (Canon) on Jun 10, 2009 at 08:21 UTC
both - and . should be treated relevant to what letters are next to them In case you have dashes/dots in between, such as ...WWW--ZZZ..., would the "--" belong to the previous or next letter group? Or does this not happen?	[reply]
Re: How to deal with such strings? by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 10, 2009 at 13:35 UTC
@-, @+ `$_ = '-XXX--XXXXXXXXX...XXXXXXWW--WWW.WWWZZZ---ZZZWW..W-.-WWWWWXXX'; printf "%s-%s: %s\n", $-[0]+1, $+[0], $1 while /[.-]([^.-])(?:\1\|[.-])/g;` [download] `1-24: X 25-35: W 36-44: Z 45-57: W 58-60: X` [download] Update: Bug fix. (Wasn't including leading "-" and "." characters.)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How to deal with such strings? by JavaFan (Canon) on Jun 10, 2009 at 08:23 UTC
So, what's the output if the string is `"X-Y"`? Does the dash belong to the X or the Y? What if the string is `"-.-.-"`?	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How to deal with such strings? by Anonymous Monk on Jun 10, 2009 at 08:34 UTC
Hi guys, thank you all! I don't think there will be a case of `XXX----YYY` (based on what I've seen from the output so far) but, if it happens, the dashes/dots will belong to the previous letter (i.e. X in this example)...	[reply] [d/l]