Perl Regular Expression Problem
We are having a problem with Perl's evaluation of regular expressions.
Here is a code snippet:
# This regular expression is looking for a word ending in "s" followed
# by something in parentheses
# If the while-block is entered, $1 should contain the word ending in "s",
# and the original word is recreated and assigned to the variable $method
print( " PRE METHOD [$method]\n" );
while ( $method && $method =~ /(\S+)s\s*\(\s*(.+)\s*\)\s*$/ )
{
$method = $1 . "s";
print( "POST METHOD [$method]\n" );
$retval = ExecuteLAMethod ($retval, $method);
.
.
.
Here is some data from the print statements:
PRE METHOD [Modules("M6833x LA")]
POST METHOD [Modules]
This looks good, as expected.
After evaluating the regular expression, $1 contains 'Module'.
The program continues:
PRE METHOD [Modules("M6833x LA")]
POST METHOD [M6833x LAs]
Here is the problem.
The $method variable contains 'Modules("M6833x LA")' and after
evaluating the regular expression, $1 contains 'M6833x LA'.
I would have expected $1 to contain 'Module is in the first case.
This anomaly is causing our regression-test suite to fail.
Here is some data regarding when this anomaly occurs:
Perl 5.6.1 Build 635 - error Never occurs
Perl 5.8.3 Build 809 - error Always occurs
Perl 5.8.7 Build 813 - error occurs on one machine, but does Not occur on
another
As you can see, we are constrained to an old version of Perl in order to
keep our test suite running.
What is the best way to troubleshoot this kind of error?
Is this a mis-use of Perl variables?
Is there a way to see what is going on inside Perl?
Someone at ActiveState suggested that our code is out-of-date with some
regexpr changes that were made for version 5.8.
Thanks for your help, Paul Schwotzer
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