Re: RegEx ignoring intervening characters?

[ikegami]

$s =~ /A[^A-Z]*B[^A-Z]*C[^A-Z]*D/;

or

# Same thing, but built dynamically.
my $re = join '[^A-Z]*', split //, 'ABCD';
$s =~ /$re/;

or

my $temp = $s;
$temp =~ s/[^A-Z]//g;
$temp =~ /ABCD/;

[mdunnbass]

Re: (my $x = $s) =~ s/[^A-Z]//g;

If I understand your code right, that'd delete anything matching [^A-Z] first, and then match the pattern second, right?

I guess I should have explained better, but I don't want to modify anything interspersed within the matching ABCD characters. In fact, I very emphatically want them to remain unmolested. So, while your approach looks like it would work, it's not quite what I was looking for.

As for $s =~ /A[^A-Z]*B[^A-Z]*C[^A-Z]*D/;

if the $x pattern I am looking for is from uc(chomp($x = <STDIN>)), would I just need to use split, inserting the [^A-Z]* after every character? would that work?

Thanks
Matt

[imp]

if the $x pattern I am looking for is from uc(chomp($x = <STDIN>)), would I just need to use split, inserting the ^A-Z* after every character? would that work?

Yes, you would do this:

my $x = <STDIN>;
chomp $x;
$x = uc($x);
my $regex = join('[^A-Z]*', split //, $x);

[webfiend]

(my $x = $s) =~ s/[^A-Z]//g;

That assigns the value of $s to $x, then performs the substitution on $x. $s is left unmolested.

$ perl -e 'chomp($orig = <STDIN>); ($tmp = $orig) =~ s/[^A-Z]//g; prin
+t "Copy: $tmp\nOriginal: $orig\n";'
WeDfT
Copy: WDT
Original: WeDfT

So it's a perfectly valid element of your solution

Update: Hey, how about I actually show it in action?

use strict;
use warnings;

chomp(my $input = <STDIN>);
(my $test = $input) =~ s/[^A-Z]//g;
if ($test =~ /ABCD/) {
    print "'$input' matches!\n";
}
else {
    print "'$input' does not match.\n";
}

$ perl test.pl
WaFFe
'WaFFe' does not match.
$ [bwisti@w3d145 tmp]$ perl test.pl
AeBwaffleCfrenchtoastD
'AeBwaffleCfrenchtoastD' matches!