Hello John,
John W. Krahn wrote on 03.12.2004:
>Jan Eden wrote:
>> Hi,
>
>Hello,
>
>> I have lines like the following:
>>
>> \begin{letter}{Name\\ Street\\ ZIP\\ Country}
>> \begin{letter}{Name\\ Street\\ ZIP}
>>
>> To extract the info, I used
>>
>> my ($data) = $file_content =~ /\\begin{letter}{(.+?)}/;
>> my ($name, $street, $zip, $country) = split /\\\\ /, $data;
>>
>> But I wonder if this is also possible using a single regex.
>
>This appears to do what you want:
>
>$ perl -le'
>@x = ( q[\begin{letter}{Name\\\ Street\\\ ZIP\\\ Country}],
> q[\begin{letter}{Name\\\ Street\\\ ZIP}]
> );
>for ( @x ) {
> print;
> my ( $n, $s, $z, $c ) = /(?:\\begin{letter}{|)([^\\}]+)(?:}|\\+\s*)/g;
> print for $n, $s, $z, $c;
> }
>'
Very nice, thank you. Just to make sure I get the idea: This pattern grabs one
or more instances of "[^\\}]+", each followed by either "}" or "\\+\s*"
First of all, I did not know regexes work like this: The first time it
encounters the capturing parentheses, it reads "Name", and then goes on to find
the delimiting (non-capturing) parentheses. But this shouldn't be recursive, so
why does it find Street etc?
A second thing: What does the pipe symbol at the end of the first non-capturing
parentheses do?
Thanks,
Jan
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