in reply to Re^2: Comparing pattern
in thread Comparing pattern

You say that you want to capture and print the string that matches, but you aren't getting the output you expect? Your examples don't make any sense to me. (How does that xml snippet relate to anything?)

If you're still having a problem with capturing and printing matches the way you want, you should post a minimal, self-contained example consisting of:

Maybe in the process of putting that together, you'll realize where the problem really is, and solve it on your own. Good luck.

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Re^4: Comparing pattern
by mrc (Sexton) on Sep 21, 2009 at 05:13 UTC
    Ok, to be more clear.

    I have this code:
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $patterns = "/path/to/patterns.txt"; my $arg1 = shift; open (PAT, '<', $patterns) or die "$patterns: $!\n"; my @patterns = <PAT>;. close(PAT); chomp @patterns; my $regex_string = join '|', @patterns; open( FILE, "<", "$arg1") or die "$arg1: $!\n"; $_ = do { local $/; <FILE> }; close(FILE); if ( /($regex_string)/is ) {print "\n$arg1\n$1\n";}
    Test list with patterns:
    /path/to/patterns.txt
    part1.*part2 Foo bar Other pattern
    Test file to scan:
    hghghgghghh part1 fff part2 jhhjhjkjk Foo bar kkjkjkj Other pattern
    $1 will show all wildcarded text between part1 and part2 and not only the pattern part1.*part2 as it should.
    /path/to/file part1 fff part2

    Also, only first pattern found is displayed now. That's not a problem, but I'd also like to know how to display all patterns if a file contains more than one.
    Please bear an unexperienced user like me. Thank you!
    Regarding the other problem with xml file to scan, I must do more tests to know exactly where the problem is.
      only first pattern found is displayed now. That's not a problem, but I'd also like to know how to display all patterns if a file contains more than one.

      That's easy -- instead of using an "if" statement like this:

      if (/($regex_string)/is) {
      just use a while loop like this -- making sure to add the "g" modifier (and while I'm at it, I'll add some clarification to the output):
      while (/$regex_string)/isg) { print "\nmatched in $arg1:\n==$1==\n"; }
      As for your other issue:

      $1 will show all wildcarded text between part1 and part2 and not only the pattern part1.*part2 as it should.

      What makes you think it "should" display the string "part1.*part2"? When using the capture variables ($1, $2, ...), the normal situation is to want the actual (complete, literal) string that matched the regex, rather than the regex string with its wildcards.

      If you want the wildcard-enabled regexes in your list to return a specific constant string, you'll probably want to include that string in your regex list file, store those replacement strings with their regexes in a separate hash, and add some logic in the while loop shown above that will replace any given matching string with the appropriate constant replacement string. Here's an adapted version the three files involved:

Re^4: Comparing pattern
by mrc (Sexton) on Sep 24, 2009 at 09:32 UTC
    Thank you very much for your reply. I can't check the code these days, but I will let you know how it's going asap.