On Mon, Jan 06, 2003 at 11:40:08PM -0200, andrej hocevar wrote: | Hello. | I've been playing around with these two REs in Perl with no | success. Can anyone tell me what's wrong?
Disclaimer:
I assume !~ means "does not match".
(I don't do perl)
(However, I know that =~ means "matches")
| This works:
| !~ /^(?:red|blue)$/
|
| and will match everything except any of the two fixed strings
| "red" or "blue" or any combination thereof.
The regex will match only the string "red" or "blue", no combinations.
The expression will be true iff the regex doesn't match.
| "black" matches, as does "blu", because it's neither red nor blue.
Close but not quite. The _regex_ doesn't match, but the expression is
true.
| Then I wanted to convert the above expression to a "positive"
| match, like this:
| =~ /^[^(?:red|blue)]$/
^ ^
What do square brackets mean? (hint: _character_ class)
A successful match with that expression will consist of :
. start of input/line/string)
. any single character as long as it is not one of bdelru()?:|.
. end of input/line/string
| which fails. Why is this?
You didn't say what you meant to say :-). Computers only do what you
say, not what you mean.
| Is there no way of saying "neither/nor", just "either/or"?
That is correct (AFAIK).
-D
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