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in reply to Re^2: dumb regex question
in thread dumb regex question

With that additional qualification, it will get a bit more tricky. My first thought was to add a space to the character class: m,"?(/[^" ]*)"?,

But that doesn't work because it won't care that it has found a space inside or outside of a quote, and will stop the regex. Meaning it would capture just "/bootMe" from the line "/bootMe any text here".

I'd suggest looking into a module like Text::xSV or Text::CSV_XS and setting the delimiter to spaces. Then reject any entry that doesn't have a leading slash. This means dropping the regex entirely.

Something like:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use Text::CSV_XS; my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new ({sep_char => ' '}); while (my $line = <DATA>) { chomp $line; # See perldoc Text::CSV_XS for warnings # about this approach with possible embedded # newlines: my $status = $csv->parse($line); my @fields; if ($status) { @fields = $csv->fields(); } else { warn "Problem parsing $line\n"; } for my $field (@fields) { print "Captured ($field) from $line\n" if $field =~ m!^/!; } } __DATA__ "/moreIters 10" "/bootMe any text here" /fewIter /some stuff here "/albatross" foo bar baz monkeys leprechauns /not monkeys /gnomes "not leprechauns though" /gnomes more data here

Which gives the output:

Captured (/moreIters 10) from "/moreIters 10" Captured (/bootMe any text here) from "/bootMe any text here" Captured (/fewIter) from /fewIter Captured (/some) from /some stuff here Captured (/albatross) from "/albatross" foo bar baz Captured (/not) from leprechauns /not monkeys Captured (/gnomes) from /gnomes "not leprechauns though" Captured (/gnomes) from /gnomes more data here