Re: while =~ consecutive matching problem

If I understand correctly, your problem is that you're looking for /\sx y\s/ repeatedly, but your search pattern includes the spaces on either side. So the first match consumes the following space, making it unavailable to be matched as the preceeding space for the next match. If you really need the spaces you could do /(?<=\s)$pattern(?=\s)/ but you might do better with /\b$pattern\b/. Additonally, you can get the count just by doing

my $count = () = $currentline =~ /\b$pattern\b/g;
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Which evaluates the match in list context, creating a list of all matches. It then assigns that in scalar context (which produces a count of the elements) to $count.

Although, none of this will match your string of abxyxyp, because it doesn't have any spaces at all, so I suspect you mistyped that.

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Re^2: while =~ consecutive matching problem by p.s (Initiate) on Nov 12, 2004 at 16:55 UTC
I will try this, thank you for such quick responses :) Yes the second line was a typo sorry, it should have spaces. I need to keep the spaces as some categories are more than 1 char long eg. qwe a x o p .Without the spaces "qwe" could be interrpted as "q w e" which I do not want. Thanks again ! :) P.	[reply]
Re^3: while =~ consecutive matching problem by Eimi Metamorphoumai (Deacon) on Nov 12, 2004 at 17:33 UTC
You might still look at `\b`. It's a zero width assertion that there's a word boundary there. Which means it's pretty much exactly like the other solution I gave except for three aspects: It's based on the difference between `\w` and `\W`, not between `\s` and `\S` (that is, it will detect a boundary after "`qwe`" in "`qwe-rty`") If your `$pattern` begins or ends with a non-word character, a `\b` will assert that it's next to a word character (while the solution based on `\s` will still assert that there is a space next to it Finally, and possibly most importantly, it will also match at the begining and end of the string. If you want the other to work there, you'll have to add spaces to the begining and end. Probably none of that is all that imporant, but it's often very useful in cases like this.	[reply] [d/l] [select]