very quick link regex

[Anonymous Monk]

I'm trying to parse a link that looks like http://www.page.com/files4/i/90c/1493010807t1.jpg

files# can be any number, /i/ can be any leter, /90c/ can be any number/letter, and the filename can be a mix of numbers and chars but will always be a .jpg. I tried my best to break it myself but I failed.

This is what I came up with.

my $content2 =~ m#(www\.page\.com/files\d+/[a..z]/\d+[a-z]/(.+)+\.jpg)
+#i;

[Thelonius]

You have [a..z] where you should have [a-z]. You also have 'my' in front of $content2, which is wrong if you are trying to match a string which is already in $content2. If you are trying to match against $_ and put the results in $content2, you should write:

my $content2 = m#(yourregexhere)#i;

or, maybe clearer,

my $content2 = ($_ =~ m#(yourregexhere)#i);

The construct (.+)+ doesn't really make sense. Just .+ would be okay, but you have to worry about matching too much. One possibility is .+?, but that's not the most efficient code and you could still get false matches in some cases, such as if the source text was, e.g.:

http://www.page.com/files4/i/90c/93898.gif is not a .jpg file

You might want

m#(www\.page\.com/files\d+/[a-z]/\d\S+\.jpg)#i

or, if this is a real HTML link,

  m#(www\.page\.com/files\d+/[a-z]/[^"']+\.jpg)#i

[Zaxo]

If you're parsing HTML, try HTML::LinkExtor. If text, Regexp::Common::URI.

The former is a parser, the latter a well-tested regex.

[GrandFather]

Are you trying to match, validate or extract parts?

my $url = 'http://www.page.com/files4/i/90c/1493010807t1.jpg';
my ($domain, $path, $file) = $url =~ m'^(\w+://[\w.]+/)(.*?/)([\w.]+)$
+';

print "$domain\n$path\n$file\n";

Prints:

http://www.page.com/
files4/i/90c/
1493010807t1.jpg

which may or may not be anything like what you need to do.

[Anno]

Other monks have provided possible solutions to your problem. I only want to comment on the subject of your query.

I may be lacking in monkish indulgence, but I resent it when a question is presented as "very quick" (or "easy", or whatever). Since you don't have a solution, how do you know it's "quick"?

Anno

[Anonymous Monk]

actually after doing a little more research I found that the link is MORE dynamic than I thought. I need to match anything after page.com/files\d+... until after the .jpg . No other part of the page has /files\d+ so if it finds a match, it'll always be the right one. Can someone help with this?

[varian]

You were very close to result already.

 
/(.+)+\.jpg

In this last part of your regexp the dot-plus will match all up to the end of line. The remaining '.jpg' part will not be found and therefore the regexp never matches.

The solution is to make the dot-plus part of the regexp less greedy, change the part above to:

/(.+?)\.jpg

[atemon]

try

my $content2 =~ m#(www\.page\.com/files\d+/.+\.jpg)#i;

Note: the code is NOT tested.

Cheers !

--VC

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