Thanks to all for the help. As j proctor noticed, the problem isn't
matching $asdf =~ /HK\$/ it's matching \$ without HK, and any other
currency symbol that includes \$.
Instead of trying to understand "zero-width negative lookbehind assertions"
(shown below), I just took the easy way out of trying to match all the
symbols except \$, then if there were no matches, assuming it to be \$.
Thanks again, and of course try out the world's best currency converter at
www.joelman.com/currency
At 02:21 PM 1/9/01 -0500, j proctor wrote:
>
>> OK. I suck at regex's. Here's the thing. For my currency converter, I've
>> got a bunch of currency symbols, like $, DM, HK$, etc. Let's say I want to
>> match a price in Hong Kong dollars. The symbol is HK$ and I want to match
>> HK$, not $. What's the regex to do this?
>
>That's easy. /HK\$/ will work just fine (provided you don't forget the
>backslash before the $).
>
>It's matching $ without an HK in front that's tricky.
>
>The easy way: test for HK$ (and every other ...$) first; if it falls
>through all of those and still has a $ in it, you can possibly assume
>it's US$ (depending on the data source, of course).
>
>If that's not an option, Perl 5 added zero-width negative lookbehind
>assertions: /(?<!HK)\$/ will match any $ that's not preceeded by HK. If
>you have other dollar-like currencies, presumably something like
>/(?<!(HK|CDN|whatever))\$/ will work.
>
>
>j
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