Print what regex finds or invert regex for substitution

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

I am trying to extract C comments from source code and drop the code. This link does exactly the opposite: http://learn.perl.org/faq/perlfaq6.html#How-do-I-use-a-regular-expression-to-strip-C-style-comments-from-a-file- Is there any easy way to either invert the regex or reuse it in a different way where it is searched for instead of replaced?

Comment on Print what regex finds or invert regex for substitution

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Re: Print what regex finds or invert regex for substitution by LanX (Saint) on Mar 17, 2012 at 20:36 UTC
http://learn.perl.org/faq/perlfaq6.html#How-do-I-use-a-regular-expression-to-strip-C-style-comments-from-a-file- In the substitution part `$2` holds the match-group you do not seem to want. So take one of the other groups! Could be that you will need to add new groups with parens: `( regexes )`, shouldn't be too complicated cause this regex is really well documented. see perlretut#Extracting matches for about how grouping and numbered vars work. Cheers Rolf	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Print what regex finds or invert regex for substitution by BrianBSL (Initiate) on Mar 17, 2012 at 20:54 UTC
Thanks very much! That worked.	[reply]