Okay, the title is kind of a joke. It's just a good-natured tweak at
merlyn for the brouhaha over his
WARNING t0mas wrote BAD CODE node that generated so much flak. No offense intended :)
merlyn's code was bugging me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. My problem was that the dot metacharacter is so indiscriminating that it will match anything. However, I simply assumed that if merlyn posted the code, it must work. His code is great if you're checking for C-style comments that begin and end in something like /* comment here */ or "? comment here ?". But if you read my post, that's not what we were checking for:
What happens if you were trying to extract questions in quotes without the trailing question mark?
I mentioned embedded question marks (my idea was that we might have more than one question in a quote), but I never mentioned embedded quotes. I just wanted one set of quotes and my original post bears that out. Here's
merlyn's code and my correction:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$myvar = q{ abc"def"g"hi?"jkl };
# This regex is from merlyn
print "matched <$1>\n" if
$myvar =~ /" # First quote
( # Capture text to $1
(?: # Non-backreferencing parentheses
(?!\?") # not question quote?
. # ok to inch along
)* # Zero or more
) # End capture
\?"/sx; # Followed by a question mark and quote
# This regex is from Ovid
print "matched <$1>\n" if
$myvar =~ /" # First quote
( # Capture text to $1
(?: # Non-backreferencing parentheses
[^?"] # Not a question mark or parentheses
| # or
\?(?!") # A question mark not followed by a quote
)* # Zero or more
) # End Capture
\?"/sx; # Followed by a question mark and quote
The first regex will print
matched <def"g"hi>. The second will print
matched <hi>.
No disrespect is intended towards Randal as he was right in pointing out that my first regex was broken.
Cheers,
Ovid
