Re^3: Need a Regular Expression that tests for words in different order and captures the values found.

Thanks,
What would I do in case of hyphens? where, I had a line that contained:
"pseudo-fred flintstone" and I wanted to skip it because this wasn't the real fred that I was keying on.

$line =~ /(?=.*\bfred\s+(\w+)/ ; 

# would get "fred" and anything "-fred"
# how would I avoid that?
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Comment on Re^3: Need a Regular Expression that tests for words in different order and captures the values found. Download Code

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Re^4: Need a Regular Expression that tests for words in different order and captures the values found. by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Jan 15, 2010 at 18:04 UTC
What would I do in case of hyphens? You need to figure out a boundary condition, then define it as a regex. For instance, in the case of `(?=.\bfred\s+(\w+))` (note the closing parenthesis, missing in your reply), the boundary condition is the `\b` word boundary assertion. It might be defined `my $boundary = qr{ \b }xms;` and used (without the `//x` modifier) (untested) `(?=.${boundary}fred\s+(\w+))` Now just change the definition of `$boundary` to fit your needs. For instance, if you wanted first names to follow anything that was not a word character and also not a hyphen, you might define (untested) `my $boundary = qr{ (?<! [\w-]) }xms;`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: Need a Regular Expression that tests for words in different order and captures the values found. by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jan 15, 2010 at 18:04 UTC
`(?<![\w-])fred` [download]	[reply] [d/l]