in reply to
regexp to grab STRING...[everything here]...DIF STRING
Just a cautionary example of greedy .* versus lazy .*? regex matching:
>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s = 'xx FOR foo IN bar baz and FOR fee fie foe IN fum yy';
;;
my @for_in = $s =~ m{ FOR .* IN }xmsg;
printf 'greedy: ';
printf qq{'$_' } for @for_in;
print '';
;;
printf 'lazy: ';
@for_in = $s =~ m{ FOR .*? IN }xmsg;
printf qq{'$_' } for @for_in;
"
greedy: 'FOR foo IN bar baz and FOR fee fie foe IN'
lazy: 'FOR foo IN' 'FOR fee fie foe IN'
Also note that in the conditional statement
if (my @captures = $string =~ m{ pattern }xmsg) {
do_something_with(@captures);
}
if nothing matches (no captures, array empty), the conditional evaluates false and the statement body is not executed.
