On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 20:21, Jim Gibson <jimsgib...@gmail.com> wrote:
snip
>> 'Hughes, D 2-0, O'Flaherty 2-0, Moylan 1-1'
snip
> The "clever" way is to use a regular expression that covers all of the
> possible cases. Here is one that works for your sample string:
>
> $x = q(Hughes, D 2-0, O'Flaherty 2-0, Moylan 1-1);
> while( $x =~ m{ \s* ([\w,\s]+) \s+ (\d+-\d+) \s* (,|\z) }gx ) {
> print "$1: $2\n";
> }
snip
Don't use \d, it doesn't mean [0-9] in Perl 5.8 and onward (it now
matches any Unicode digit character).
The important part here is that /[0-9]+-[0-9]+(?:,|\z)/ will match the
end of the string we want. It is actually harmful to try to specify
what comes before it. For instance, your regex won't match
"O'Flaherty". When you don't need to verify and you don't need to
anchor the regex, it is better to be as generic as possible. In this
case, /.*?/ will match the runner's name regardless of how it is
formatted. Names are particularly troublesome things. Another fairly
common issue is hyphenated names like "Foo-Bar".
--
Chas. Owens
wonkden.net
The most important skill a programmer can have is the ability to read.
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org
For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org
http://learn.perl.org/
