in reply to Seeking a better way to do it
A few approaches, some already covered by others:
- The split approach produces a lot of 'noise' (even when using a more reasonable /\W+/ split pattern) that must be removed with further processing.
- A tricky approach is to try to figure out just what a 'player' is and define a regex to extract those substrings.
- Maybe the easiest and most reliable approach is to go to the dramatis personae list at the beginning of the play, look at all the players found there, and make a regex of that.
>perl -wMstrict -le "my $char_list = 'Exit Cassio; Enter Iago, Othello, and others'; ;; my @words = split /\W+/, $char_list; printf qq{'$_' } for @words; print ''; ;; ;; my $not_player = qr{ (?! Enter | Exit) }xms; my $player = qr{ \b $not_player [[:upper:]] [[:lower:]]+ }xms; ;; my @players = $char_list =~ m{ $player }xmsg; printf qq{'$_' } for @players; print ''; ;; ;; my @dramatis_personae = qw(Cassio Iago Othello); my ($character) = map qr{ \b (?: $_) \b }xms, join '|', @dramatis_personae ; ;; @players = $char_list =~ m{ $character }xmsg; printf qq{'$_' } for @players; " 'Exit' 'Cassio' 'Enter' 'Iago' 'Othello' 'and' 'others' 'Cassio' 'Iago' 'Othello' 'Cassio' 'Iago' 'Othello'
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