Re: Printing out matches for two regular expressions

[choroba]

Why do you set $/ to a space? It reads the input file word by word and can never match the second part of the expression, it never sees the #cats together with their fin.

To find all the matches on one line, use while instead of if.

Finally, the second capture group populates $2, even after the vertical bar. Use a restart pattern to always start populating $1 in alternatives:

    while (m/(?|(\d)+?|(?<=#)(.*?)(?= fin))/g) {

Which could be simplified to

    while (m/(?|(\d)+?|#(.*?) fin)/g) {

Update: Are you sure about (\d)+? ? Have you tested it with numbers of more than one digit? You probably wanted just plain (\d+) .

[Maire]

Brilliant! Thank you very much for your help!

Also thanks for your tip about setting $/ to a space. In an earlier version of the script, I was trying to just locate multiple numbers across several lines; setting $/ to a space stopped the script from only printing the first number on each line. However, I realise now that it is inappropriate for the current task. Thanks again!

[AnomalousMonk]

The only thing I would add to choroba's comprehensive comments is that you might consider adding some kind of boundary assertion to the  fin delimiter pattern: see what happens when the  \b assertion in the match used below is omitted. I agree that the look-arounds don't seem needed, so I've left them out. (I use  \x23 instead of  # in my pattern only because my REPL doesn't like octothorpes.)

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"use 5.010;
 ;;
 my @lines = (
   'The 2 cats and the dog.',
   'The 8 cats and the 6 dogs.',
   'The 3 pigs and the 2 sheep.',
   '',
   '#story fin #cats and dogs fin #sheep fin',
   'blah yada',
   '#sharkfin soup fin #fish fingers fin',
   '9 fleas, 87 ticks, 654 lice.',
   '42 cats #some sheep fin and 1 dog',
   );
 ;;
 for my $line (@lines) {
   printf qq{'$line' -> };
   ;;
   my $parsed =
   my @extracted =
   $line =~ m{ (?| (\d+) | \x23 (.*?) \s+ fin \b) }xmsg;
   ;;
   print $parsed ? map qq{'$_' }, @extracted : 'nothing parsed';
   }
"
'The 2 cats and the dog.' -> '2'
'The 8 cats and the 6 dogs.' -> '8' '6'
'The 3 pigs and the 2 sheep.' -> '3' '2'
'' -> nothing parsed
'#story fin #cats and dogs fin #sheep fin' -> 'story' 'cats and dogs' 
+'sheep'
'blah yada' -> nothing parsed
'#sharkfin soup fin #fish fingers fin' -> 'sharkfin soup' 'fish finger
+s'
'9 fleas, 87 ticks, 654 lice.' -> '9' '87' '654'
'42 cats #some sheep fin and 1 dog' -> '42' 'some sheep' '1'

[Maire]

Thanks!