Need a Method to add recursion to my regex

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

This is my current working code. Its purpose is to find a string of amino acids that match a regular expression and put the matching string as well as what is found before and after the matching string in 3 separate scalars.

if($sequence[1] =~ m/^(.*)$reg(.*)$/i){
          $aligned[$posCount][0] = $1;
          $aligned[$posCount][1] = $2;
          $aligned[$posCount][2] = $3;
}
[download]

$reg used to be a regular expression contained in a single set of parens. Example: $reg = (K[STN]\w\w[GST]\w{1,2}[KRA]R[IVF]); But now I have set it up to automatically place parens around \w of variable length, so the previous $reg would now be: $reg = (K[STN]\w\w[GST])(\w{1,2})([KRA]R[IVF]); Such that a string searched against a regular expression with 1 variable length component would be split into 5 pieces. The stuff found before the match, constant length match1, variable length match, constant length match2, the stuff found after the match. I want to make it so a user could have any number of variable length regions. Is there a method with which I could add recursion?

if($sequence[1] =~ m/^(.*)$reg(.*)$/i){
         for(my $x = 0; $x < $numInsertionDeletes; $x++){
               $aligned[$posCount][$x] = ????????;
         }
      }
[download]

Comment on Need a Method to add recursion to my regex Select or Download Code

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Re: Need a Method to add recursion to my regex by tobyink (Canon) on Jun 18, 2012 at 19:28 UTC
I think what you're looking for is: `$aligned[$posCount] = [ $sequence[1] =~ m/^(.)$reg(.)$/i ];` [download] If you provided some sample input and expected output, then we could know for sure. `perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'`	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Need a Method to add recursion to my regex by vivomancer (Initiate) on Jun 19, 2012 at 16:39 UTC
I think this is exactly what I needed. So far all testing that I've done has yielded the expected results. Thank you.	[reply]
Re: Need a Method to add recursion to my regex by choroba (Cardinal) on Jun 18, 2012 at 19:28 UTC
Untested: `if (my @matches = $sequence[1] =~ m/^(.)$reg(.)$/i) { @{ $aligned[$posCount] }[ 0 .. $numInsertionDeletes - 1 ] = @match +es; }` [download]	[reply] [d/l]