using ? and ?? in regex

OzzyOsbourne has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I was using the following code to extract certain files with file::find. It works fine if I name individual files. I thought I'd get slick and try to make it shorter by using mp?? to replace mpeg, mp3, mp2, etc. and I replaced rmj, rmx, etc with rm?.

Problem is, now it doesn't find any of these files. What am I missing?

sub wanted {
    if 

(!("$File::Find::dir"=~/}/)&&(/\.asf$|\.mp??$|\.avi$|\.exe$|\.wav$|\.z
+ip$|\.mov$|\.rm?$|\.wma$/i)){
        print OUTFILE "$_\n";
        print "$_\n";
        }
[download]

Thanks, again.

-OzzyOsbourne

Comment on using ? and ?? in regex Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: using ? and ?? in regex by merlyn (Sage) on Apr 26, 2001 at 17:40 UTC
? in a regex doesn't mean "one character". It's a modifier. You want "." instead. So ".." to find any two characters. Regex syntax is not glob (filename wildcards) syntax. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]
Re: using ? and ?? in regex by hdp (Beadle) on Apr 26, 2001 at 17:41 UTC
You're using `?` in the shell wildcard sense to mean "any character"; unfortunately, that's not what it means in a regular expression. See perldoc perlre for a list of all the metacharacters. You probably want `.` instead. hdp.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: using ? and ?? in regex by suaveant (Parson) on Apr 26, 2001 at 17:43 UTC
because ? modifies the character before it... mp? matches m or mp... ?? matches non-greedily, so if mp is there... it will only match m unless it needs to match the p for later parts of the regex to match. .? will match a single char if it is there... .{0,2} will match 0 to 2 characters. .?.? would as well, but I think .{0,2} may be better. - Ant	[reply]
Re: using ? and ?? in regex by Malkavian (Friar) on Apr 26, 2001 at 17:45 UTC
Try mp\w+$, as the ? is the shell (*NIX) single char wildcard. The \w+ will most likely give you the behaviour you want (or \w{1,2} if you want either 1 or 2 chars.). Cheers, Malk	[reply]
Re: using ? and ?? in regex by diarmuid (Beadle) on Apr 26, 2001 at 17:53 UTC
well ? is a modifier to your search so I'm not even sure what mp?? will match . mp? will match mp or m so I guess mp?? will match m or mp also. What you need is `mp\w{1,2}`. similarly for rmj use `rm\w`	[reply] [d/l] [select]


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