Re^4: Need some help with Regex

I've recently started using Perl. All apologies for not being able to express the problem lucidly. almut, seems to have got what I was looking for...


/name\s*=\s*([A-Za-z].+\w)/
[download]

I used \w as per your advise and got what I was really looking for... This works like a charm!! Thanks again, for sending me perlre document (I've bookmarked it :-) ) Cheers!!

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Re^5: Need some help with Regex by GrandFather (Saint) on Feb 07, 2010 at 19:43 UTC
That may not be doing what you expect! Consider: `#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; for my $tail ('Z.z', '1.z', 'a(x)z', 'aaa', 'aa_', 'xxx@') { my $str = "name = $tail"; if ($str =~ /name\s=\s([A-Za-z].+\w)/) { print "Matched >$1< in >$str<\n"; } else { print "No match for >$str<\n"; } }` [download] Prints: `Matched >Z.z< in >name = Z.z< No match for >name = 1.z< Matched >a(x)z< in >name = a(x)z< Matched >aaa< in >name = aaa< Matched >aa_< in >name = aa_< Matched >xxx< in >name = xxx@<` [download] `[A-Za-z]` matches a single letter. `.+` matches at least one characters and as many as it possibly can such that the remainder of the regular expression matches. `\w` matches a single alphanumeric or underscore character. True laziness is hard work	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re^5: Need some help with Regex
by GrandFather (Saint) on Feb 07, 2010 at 19:43 UTC

That may not be doing what you expect! Consider:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

for my $tail ('Z.z', '1.z', 'a(x)z', 'aaa', 'aa_', 'xxx@') {
    my $str = "name = $tail";
    
    if ($str =~ /name\s*=\s*([A-Za-z].+\w)/) {
        print "Matched >$1< in >$str<\n";
    } else {
        print "No match for >$str<\n";
    }
}
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Prints:

Matched >Z.z< in >name = Z.z<
No match for >name = 1.z<
Matched >a(x)z< in >name = a(x)z<
Matched >aaa< in >name = aaa<
Matched >aa_< in >name = aa_<
Matched >xxx< in >name = xxx@<
[download]

[A-Za-z] matches a single letter. .+ matches at least one characters and as many as it possibly can such that the remainder of the regular expression matches. \w matches a single alphanumeric or underscore character.

True laziness is hard work

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[d/l]
[select]