Search a match to a regex from the END of a string

[Doctrin]

Hello dear Monks! Is there a way to make Perl search matches from the end of a string, not from start (except inversing the string itself)? Thanks

[Athanasius]

Like this?

22:06 >perl -wE "my $s = 'abc1abc2abc3abc4abc5zz'; $s =~ /.*(abc\d)/; 
+say qq[matched $1] if $1;"
matched abc5

22:07 >

The greedy quantifier in the regex term .* eats up as much of the search string as possible, thereby ensuring that the last match is found.

Hope that helps,

[MidLifeXis]

ISTR seeing a typical response to this query being to reverse the string and search for the reversed pattern. Is there a reason that is restricted from your solution set?

Beyond that, is there some more information that you can give that may help provide a solution within the problem domain you are approaching? It can be easier to find a solution for a specific problem set than for the entire generalized problem set.

[flexvault]

Doctrin,

And there is 'rindex' which is very fast and easy to use.

   perl -e '$d="/usr/local/bin/perl"; $i=rindex($d,"\/"); print substr
+($d,$i+1),"\n";'

which prints 'perl'. The Camel book has examples of how to do recursive searches.

Good Luck...Ed

[sundialsvc4]

An example of the data would help.   You can, of course, specify the “end-of-string anchor” character as part of your pattern.   Then, beyond that, consider whether the pattern should or should not be “greedy.”   (A greedy pattern always seeks the longest possible matching string.)

It would be a good idea to test your regex against a number of representative strings that you do and that you don’t expect should match, e.g. with Test::More, to make very sure that the regex you come up with does what you need it to.

[Anonymous Monk]

How do you mean?
In Perl is there more than ONE WAY to do it..