Re: regex matching problem

There are some expression-comment disagreements to fix and improvements to make:

   /([\d]+)  # match first nonspace ( greedy )
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No, that's matching digits.

([\w\s|"|\-|\']+) # capture at word boundary
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This is a mess, not a word boundary. You want it to be followed by spaces and digits, which it matches, so it's going to backtrack from the $ or @, so you could do ([^@\$]+) (update: backslashed $).

\s\s+     # single space followed by multiple spaces
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Should be written \s{2,}, but ok.

([\d,\.]+) # capture digit, comma, period
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Any number of them, in any order.

\s[^\d]+   # single space, non-digit character
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correct, but better as \s\D+

Are the strings you're using in your test case the same strings that fail in the actual program?

The PerlMonk tr/// Advocate

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Re: Re: regex matching problem by geektron (Curate) on Jan 20, 2004 at 18:01 UTC
ok, i guess my comments aren't all proper. :-( the original one was whitespaces ... the strings, at least on STDOUT, are identical. i just tossed in this in the 'real' parser: `my $string2 = '5422 Texas Home Luggage Tag 6 @ $ 3 +.95 = $ 23.70'; print "identical strings \n" if $_ eq $string2;` [download] and it did, in fact, print "identical strings".	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: regex matching problem by geektron (Curate) on Jan 20, 2004 at 18:19 UTC
("\|\-\|\'+) # capture at word boundary This is a mess, not a word boundary. You want it to be followed by spaces and digits, which it matches, so it's going to backtrack from the $ or @, so you could do (^@$+). actually, that mess seems to be necessary. chaning it to your suggestion breaks the matching. $1 should be set to '5422' in the test string.	[reply]
Re^3: regex matching problem by Roy Johnson (Monsignor) on Jan 20, 2004 at 19:00 UTC
The $ needs to be backslashed, so it isn't parsed as a variable. Then it works. I didn't expect variable interpolation in a character class. Oops. The PerlMonk `tr///` Advocate	[reply]
Re: Re^3: regex matching problem by geektron (Curate) on Jan 20, 2004 at 21:17 UTC
ah. i'll try it on the upcoming revision of the regex. i discovered that "product numbers" in the data files can also look like this: 4444-NC, 3434-43, etc. my regex-fu was never that great. it's sure gonna get a workout.	[reply]