Re: Re: Regular Expression To Extract Multiple Matches Pattern

I must be missing something - Why are we using the character set match of [a-z] in place of \w ? The use of \w would make the resulting code a lot more readable. Eg.

while ($teststring =~ /\b(\w+-\w+-\w+)\b/gi) {
  print "$1\n";
}
[download]

Also too, the boundary markers \b as suggested in the reply by Kanji have merit and I think warrant inclusion.

Update

As busunsl rightly points out, \w includes the underscore character in matching which has not been specified for inclusion ... [\w[^_]] anyone? :-)

perl -e 's&&rob@cowsnet.com.au&&&split/[@.]/&&s&.com.&_&&&print'

Comment on Re: Re: Regular Expression To Extract Multiple Matches Pattern Select or Download Code

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Re: Re: Re: Regular Expression To Extract Multiple Matches Pattern by busunsl (Vicar) on Jan 07, 2002 at 16:20 UTC
Perhaps because \w includes the underscore and that was not asked for.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Regular Expression To Extract Multiple Matches Pattern by blakem (Monsignor) on Jan 08, 2002 at 00:23 UTC
`[\w[^_]]` [download] Nested character classes aren't implemented yet... That will parse somthing like this: `[ # start char class \w # any word char [ # or a literal '[' ^ # or a literal '^' _ # or an underscore (redundant...) ] # end char class ] # followed by a literal ']'` [download] If you want a character class consisting of all the word chars except underscore, you need to use the double negative (and somewhat non-intuitive): `[^\W_]` [download] Which matches a character that is not a non word char (i.e a word char) and not an underscore. `% perl -le '/[^\W_]/ && print for qw(a b _ c d)' a b c d` [download] -Blake	[reply] [d/l] [select]