On May 10, Dave K said: >"Jeff 'Japhy' Pinyan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message >[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... >> On May 10, Dave K said: >> >> >while (<IN>) { >> > if ( m/,$p1|$p2|$p3|$p4|$p5|$p6|$p7|$p8,/ ) { >> >> You need ()'s around the $p1|$p2|... part. The regex >> >> /,abc|def|ghi,/ >> >> is not the same as >> >> /,(abc|def|ghi),/ >> >> Do you see why? > >No I don't see why I need (). (but I do see an opportunity to learn >something...). The kludge I posted does work (with the sample data in the >original post). Why would () be required? If I understood the post >correctly the task did not require capturing any numbers.
The OP wanted to match any of a set of numbers, BETWEEN COMMAS. Let's use a much smaller example. Here's my data: 11453,342,65788 49384,523,48493 00120,148,98233 If I want to see what lines have 342, 484, or 823, BETWEEN COMMAS, I need a regex like /,(342|484|823),/ or /,(?:342|484|823),/ You need to group them together. If you don't, you get /,342|484|823,/ which means "match ',324' or '484' or '823,'", so you would get false matches. -- Jeff "japhy" Pinyan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/ RPI Acacia brother #734 http://www.perlmonks.org/ http://www.cpan.org/ ** Look for "Regular Expressions in Perl" published by Manning, in 2002 ** <stu> what does y/// stand for? <tenderpuss> why, yansliterate of course. [ I'm looking for programming work. If you like my work, let me know. ] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
