http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=478145


in reply to Re^2: Capture Lookahead
in thread Capture Lookahead

If you want to find palindromes, why not do it with a regex directly?

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my $str = do {local $/; <DATA>}; $str =~ s/\s+//g; while ( $str =~ m/( (..+) .? (??{ reverse $2 }) )/xgc ) { print pos( $str ) . ": $1\n"; pos( $str ) = $-[0] + 1; # slide pos back to the left }

prints:

14: AGGGA 21: TACAT 25: GTTG 55: GAAAAAAAG ...etc...

I'm not sure how it would compare with the two-stage approach for speed, though. It is much faster if you minimize the qualifier ..+?, but then you end up with the shortest palindrome at each position, rather than the longest.

I make the assumption that you don't care about palindromes shorter than 4 characters. If you bump that upwards, things get faster.

Update: I tested, and it looks like the substr approach is considerably faster, particularly if you do it in a single pass.