Re: Perl Complains of Nested Quantifiers

Since you're seeking help, you'd better explain what you mean by "change my previously greedy quantification into a possessive modality" -- perhaps with a description of your intent that actually provides comprehensible information. And it wouldn't hurt to show a (small) sample of your data and your desired output (and possibly, explain why the last part of the code sample in para 1, ($meanSearchTerm) doesn't match the error message you posted.

BTW, Perl 5.14 on win7 executes your sample (minus the ($meanSearchTerm) without squawking:

C:>perl -e "my $foo='123.123';$foo =~/(\d++\.\d++)/oi; print $1;"
123.123
C:>
[download]

Update/afterthought: I was actually well started writing an explanation of why that wouldn't compile when I decided to check. Once again, testing saves my butt.

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Re^2: Perl Complains of Nested Quantifiers by sunmaz (Novice) on May 22, 2012 at 16:15 UTC
Please refer to my above reply. I hope that is sufficiently detailed. It is curious that it works on 5.14. It does not on the version I am running (5.8.8).	[reply]
Re^3: Perl Complains of Nested Quantifiers by toolic (Bishop) on May 22, 2012 at 16:39 UTC
I think "Possessive Quantifiers" in perl5100delta Regular-expressions explains the version dependency. I am on 5.12.2, and here is what re shows: `$ perl -Mre=debug -e '/\d++/' Compiling REx "\d++" synthetic stclass "ANYOF[0-9][{unicode_all}]". Final program: 1: SUSPEND (7) 3: PLUS (5) 4: DIGIT (0) 5: SUCCEED (0) 6: TAIL (7) 7: END (0) stclass ANYOF[0-9][{unicode_all}] minlen 1 Freeing REx: "\d++" $ $ $ perl -Mre=debug -e '/\d+++/' Compiling REx "\d+++" Nested quantifiers in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/\d+++ <-- HERE / +at -e line 1. $` [download]	[reply] [d/l]