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

Hello dear monks~

I have a very quick question. I am looking for accounting policies and I would like to take the following three sentences after following the match.

Here is my code. 

my $test='deferred gross profit is blah blah blah.';

if($test=~m/(\bdeferred|unrealized)(.*)(\.)/)
{
    print "matched $1 and the rest is $2";
}

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This code captures only the first sentence. How can I modify the code so I capture the next three sentences?

Thank you for your time and consideration

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Quick Regex quesiton
by wind (Priest) on Apr 08, 2011 at 18:03 UTC
    Do you want each sentence in a separate capture? Then the following would work: 
    my $test = do {local $/; <DATA>};

if ($test =~ m{((?:deferred|unrealized).*?\.)\s*(.*?\.)\s*(.*?\.)}s) {
    print "print '$1', '$2', '$3'";
}

__DATA__
foo bar. baz biz.
deferred gross profit is blah blah blah. more
blah.  and yet more blah.  But not this blah.

    [download]
    Or if you don't care about them being separate, you could use the following 
    if ($test =~ m{(?=deferred|unrealized)((?:.*?\.){3})}s) {

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Re: Quick Regex quesiton
by JavaFan (Canon) on Apr 08, 2011 at 23:15 UTC
    Look ma, without modifiers, backtracking, or /.*?/ (the only pattern worse than /.*/): 
    /(\b(?:deferred|unrealized)\b)[^.]*\.)([^.]*\.)([^.]*\.)/ and
print "Sentence 1: $1; Sentence 2: $2; Sentence 3: $3\n";

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Re: Quick Regex quesiton
by jethro (Monsignor) on Apr 08, 2011 at 18:07 UTC

    I assume all the text is stored in $text. So you could use

    if($test=~m/(\bdeferred|unrealized)(.*?\.){1,3}/s) {

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    Untested. Try it out. Note the s at the end to make sure that '.' matches also \n. You don't need that if the sentences are all on one line

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Re: Quick Regex quesiton
by chakreey (Acolyte) on Apr 08, 2011 at 17:59 UTC
    What are those three sentences you want to capture ? As, I understand, "deferred gross profit is blah blah blah." is sentence number 1. What are sentences 2 and 3 ?
[reply]

      I just did that as an example. I want to capture what follows. So it would be deferred gross profit blah blah. blah blah. blah. So I want to capture the rest.And I don't know how :(

      Does this work?

      <code> if ($test=~m/(deferred|gross)(.*)(\.)(.*)(\.)(.*)(\.)) { print "$1, $2, $4, $6"; }

      Or is there a more elegant way to do it?

      Thank you so much :)

[reply]
        Your code doesn't work ! (.*) seems to consider real full stop (.) as any-character.

        btw wind's code works !

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