Re^2: regular expression help

[Roy Johnson]

...consider splitting...

Or define your X subpattern as a separate regex, then build the pattern with it:

my $subpat = qr/(?:<\*\d+>)?([^<]+)<(\d+):(\d+)>/;
$str =~/$subpat(?:,$subpat)*/;

However, the capturing parentheses are not going to capture everything this way.

[ikegami]

However, the capturing parentheses are not going to capture everything this way.

That's why I didn't recommend it. Perl's match operator can match extremely complex expressions (the initial purpose of regular expressions) and it can extract data from strings, but it's not so good at doing both at once. (At least not before 5.10. 5.10 added a bunch of tools that might help.)

[pip9ball]

Thanks for the suggestion...I will try doing something like this!