No, regex is not a requirement. I was originally trying to test on a difficult example something I read in Programming Perl--Chap 5.7.2 Clustering, p 185:
------------------------- In the remainder of the chapter, we'll see many more regex extensions, all of which cluster without capturing, as well as doing something else. The (?:PATTERN) extension is just special in that it does nothing else. So if you say: @fields = split(/\b(?:a|b|c)\b/) it's like: @fields = split(/\b(a|b|c)\b/) but doesn't spit out extra fields. (The split operator is a bit like m//g in that it will emit extra fields for all the captured substrings within the pattern. Ordinarily, split only returns what it didn't match. For more on split see Chapter 29, "Functions".) ------------------------- It seems to me that 'split /a/' and 'split /(?:a)/' both split on and do not emit 'a'; whereas, 'a' should be part of the split result in the latter case. Thanks again. -----Original Message----- From: Robert Citek [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 11:21 PM To: Zeus Odin Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: A very annoying regex question. Hello Zeus, At 11:55 AM 1/29/2003 -0500, Zeus Odin wrote: >An even shorter version of yours is: >------------------------- >my @a; >while(<DATA>){ > next unless /=/ && chomp; > push @a, split /=/, $_, 2; >} >print "$_\n" for @a; >------------------------- This is even shorter, eliminates all uses of variables, and slurps in the data all at once: #!/usr/bin/perl -w0 print join("\n", map({split(/=/,$_,2)} grep(/=/, split(/\n/, <DATA>)))); The only thing it does not do is use the regex. Is the regex a requirement? Regards, - Robert -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
