capture global substitution in an array

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

Hello Monks,

Movable Type has a "regex_replace" tag modifier that takes two arguments, a regular expression, and a replacement expression, and returns the modified string.

My problem is that I'd like to write a plugin that returns an array of the individual modified strings instead of the whole string. I thought that would be easy. And it may be, but not for me. The challenge is that while the match regex operator can return an array, the same is not true for substitutions. So while the following returns matches, the behaviour is not the same for substitutions.

@matches = $text =~ /$regex/smg)

Here's the original code for MT's "regex_replace" modifier. I'd offer my attempts, but really I tried a lot of things and just got nowhere. I end up just getting the number of substitutions whereas I'd like to capture the substitutions themselves.

TIA!

=head2 regex_replace

Applies a regular expression operation on the input. This filter accep
+ts
B<two> input values: one is the pattern, the second is the replacement
+.

B<Example:>

    <$mt:EntryTitle regex_replace="/\s*\[.+?\]\s*$/",""$>

This would strip any bracketed phrase from the end of the entry
title field.

=cut

sub _fltr_regex_replace {
    my ( $str, $val, $ctx ) = @_;

    # This one requires an array
    return $str unless ref($val) eq 'ARRAY';
    my $patt    = $val->[0];
    my $replace = $val->[1];
    if ( $patt =~ m!^(/)(.+)\1([A-Za-z]+)?$! ) {
        $patt = $2;
        my $global;
        if ( my $opt = $3 ) {
            $global = 1 if $opt =~ m/g/;
            $opt =~ s/[ge]+//g;
            $patt = "(?$opt)" . $patt;
        }
        my $re = eval {qr/$patt/};
        if ( defined $re ) {
            $replace =~ s!\\\\(\d+)!\$1!g;  # for php, \\1 is how you 
+write $1
            $replace =~ s!/!\\/!g;
            eval '$str =~ s/$re/' . $replace . '/' . ( $global ? 'g' :
+ '' );
            if ($@) {
                return $ctx->error("Invalid regular expression: $@");
            }
        }
    }
    return $str;
}
[download]

(update: corrected title spelling)

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Re: capture global substituion inot an array by moritz (Cardinal) on Apr 29, 2012 at 16:37 UTC
What exactly do you mean by "capture the substitutions"? A substitution is an action, not something you can express in a perl scalar. Only its return value and the result of the string it acted upon are easily captured. Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed	[reply]
Re^2: capture global substituion inot an array by wrinkles (Pilgrim) on Apr 29, 2012 at 17:39 UTC
Yes, I suspected that the real problem lies in my misunderstanding. I imagined that there is a mythical "replace" string that substitutes for the matched string. The "replace" of a regex replace is the entire resulting string, and not some discrete "diff" element. Thanks for helping me understand that better. Perhaps what I am really looking to do (although it may be ill-conceived) is: Capture the array of matched substrings based on the first modifier argument loop through the array, performing a regex substitution on each substring based on the second argument. return the list of modified substrings This algorithm is certainly not a standard "regex substitution". I'll have to think more about this to determine if it even makes sense to do. But at least you have helped me define the problem. Thanks!	[reply]
Re^3: capture global substituion inot an array by ww (Archbishop) on Apr 29, 2012 at 17:45 UTC
Sounds as though perlretut and tutorials re Pattern Matching, Regular Expressions, and Parsing might be useful.	[reply]
Re^3: capture global substituion inot an array by wrinkles (Pilgrim) on Apr 29, 2012 at 17:50 UTC
So now I'm thinking that the tag modifier needs three arguments: The match regex expression to extract the substrings. The substitution regex to perform on these captured substrings. The replace expression. Is that as crazy as it sounds to me? :)	[reply]
Re^2: capture global substituion inot an array by wrinkles (Pilgrim) on Apr 30, 2012 at 17:52 UTC
Moritz thanks again for your insight, it helped me greatly. I pushed the RegexList Movable Type plugin to github. The plugin is a tag modifer, meaning you place it into any Movable Type tag that outputs text. The modifier has three arguments. One specifies the substrings to process, and the other two are the "search" regex expression and the replace expression. The result of course is an array of processed substrings which are passed directly within the parent tag to a Movable type array variable (via the built-in setvar modifier). The optional fourth argument to the regex_list modifier defines an alternate capture variable (1-9) to the first match expression (the default is the whole match ($&). I've pasted the main module code below. Read more... (3 kB)	[reply] [d/l]