Re: Pattern Match

[Athanasius]

Hello Nansh,

My code works for both of the files

This can’t be exactly true, since a regex containing Fruits (note the literal character s) will never match Fruit{ Apple } in which the s is missing. Perhaps this was merely a typo; otherwise, you need to make the s optional: Fruits?.

Speaking of ?, in its current position in the regex — (.*)? — it acts as a quantifier specifying zero or one repetitions of the preceding expression. In the present case this adds nothing, since the expression it quantifies already specifies zero or more characters. More likely, you were looking to make the * quantifier non-greedy, in which case the ? needs to go inside the capturing parentheses:

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<DATA>)
{
    print ">$1<\n" if / ^ \s* Fruits? \s* \{ \s* (.*?) \s* \} /x;
}

__DATA__
Fruits{ Apple Mango Grape Watermelon }
Fruit{ Apple }
Fruits{ Lemon Mandarin }{ Orange Fig Pineapple }
Vegetable{ Carrot }

Output:

17:48 >perl 1784_SoPW.pl
>Apple Mango Grape Watermelon<
>Apple<
>Lemon Mandarin<

17:48 >

Hope that helps,