I am trying to write a regular expression to aid in the
parsing of a configuration file and I want to allow the
users of the configuration file to specify any character
in their directive including the special characters for
the file format (comment (#), equivalance (=), etc.)
and I have been trying to write an appropriate regex with
no success.
I am new at this and I have tried:
s/([^(?:([^\\]|\A)\\(\\{2})*\#)]*)(.*)/$1/
which represents a # not followed by an odd number
of \'s (since \\# is the \ character metaquoted followed
by a comment) but that didn't work becasue
^ only represents
single characters and not sets of characters.
I then tried the perl 5.005 negative lookbehind (?<!) but
it only allows fixed width lookbehinds and I want to allow
any number of \'s.
Currently I am doing:
split /\Q#\E/;
$_ = $_[0];
if(/\A\s*\Z/) {
next;
}
$string = $_;
for($i = 1; $i <= $#_; $i++) {
$_ = $_[$i - 1];
m/(.)((\\){2})*\Z/;
if("$1" eq "\\") {
$string .= "\#" . $_[$i];
} else {
last;
}
}
Can anyone suggest a regex to do all that work? I remember
seeing one to correctly parse a C string somewhere which
would deal with these same issues, but hard as I look I
cannot find it.
Will
Originally posted as a Categorized Question.