Determing if this regex matched

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

Howdy Bros. I have some text titles in a database field, some of which have leading/trailing blanks and/or quotes that I want to get rid of. But I only want to update the record if the title was in fact changed.

I have this code for a simplified illustration of the problem

my @items = ('"Title Text Example"', 'Title Text Example', ' Title Tex
+t Example ',' "Title Text Example"');
foreach my $title (@items) {
    $title =~ s/^\s*\"?|\"?\s*$//g;
    print length($&)," $title\n";
}
[download]

Question is, how do I tell if the substitution matched anything? I thought I could check $&, but it's zero length every time through the loop. I don't understand why that is, because it's supposed to give the last successful pattern match, and there are successful matches in every case except the second.

Steve

Comment on Determing if this regex matched Download Code

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Re: Determing if this regex matched by toolic (Bishop) on Aug 06, 2011 at 19:40 UTC
Use an "if" statement to check the return of s/// (returns the number of substitutions made; false otherwise): `use strict; use warnings; my @items = ('"Title Text Example1"', 'Title Text Example2', ' Title T +ext Example3 ',' "Title Text Example4"'); foreach my $title (@items) { my $match = 0; $match++ if $title =~ s/^[\s"]+//; $match++ if $title =~ s/[\s"]+$//; print "$title.\n" if $match; } __END__ Title Text Example1. Title Text Example3. Title Text Example4.` [download] Updated to match both begin and end.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Determing if this regex matched by cormanaz (Deacon) on Aug 06, 2011 at 19:57 UTC
Hey! I had no idea s/// returned anything. Also a more straightforward way to write the regex. Problem is, with the or, the second sub doesn't get executed if the first one matches, so there is still the trailing quote on examples 1 and 4. I suppose one could do `my @items = ('"Title Text Example"', 'Title Text Example', ' Title Tex +t Example ',' "Title Text Example"'); foreach my $title (@items) { my $changed = 0; if ($title =~ s/^[\s"]+//) { $changed=1; } if ($title =~ s/[\s"]+$//) { $changed=1; } if ($changed) { print "$title\n"; } }` [download] But that doesn't seem very elegant.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Determing if this regex matched by ww (Archbishop) on Aug 06, 2011 at 20:06 UTC
For the elegant method, try perlretut (and family), "Mastering Regular Expressions," Tutorials, perhaps. But -- IMO -- "elegant" is frequently overrated; the real question, I think, is "does it work, consistently?"	[reply]
Re^4: Determing if this regex matched by cormanaz (Deacon) on Aug 06, 2011 at 20:34 UTC
Re^5: Determing if this regex matched by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Aug 07, 2011 at 10:22 UTC
Re^3: Determing if this regex matched by merlyn (Sage) on Aug 06, 2011 at 20:12 UTC
Too much work! `my @items = ('"Title Text Example"', 'Title Text Example', ' Title Tex +t Example ',' "Title Text Example"'); foreach (@items) { if (s/^[\s"]+// or s/[\s"]+$//) { print "$_\n"; } }` [download] -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Determing if this regex matched by cormanaz (Deacon) on Aug 06, 2011 at 20:30 UTC
Re: Determing if this regex matched by toolic (Bishop) on Aug 07, 2011 at 00:16 UTC
I thought I could check $&, but it's zero length every time through the loop. I don't understand why that is, because it's supposed to give the last successful pattern match, and there are successful matches in every case except the second. The `g` modifier seems to be clearing $& (or maybe it never gets set in the first place). Add re to your code and you should see the match be successful at first, but it ultimately fails: `use re 'debug';` [download] In any case, the `g` modifier is probably doing you more harm than good. Perhaps a more knowledgeable monk can elaborate on what's going on here. Further reading: perlre perlreref	[reply] [d/l] [select]