Detlef, thanks for this clear expose of your code snippet. I have been avoiding
similar constructs because I never could find the time to understand it and the docs I
have access to are just not clear enough on this. Your code does some of the things I
am doing in Perl, and it does it with much less effort.
Uli Wienands
> ----------
> From: Detlef Lindenthal
> Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 16:03
> To: Georgia Citizen; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [MacPerl] Get text from X to Y in a string
>
> Tony wrote:
> >>> I want to be able to grab a section of a string, starting at X and ending at Y.
>
> Detlef Lindenthal wrote:
>
> >> ## Grab the amount like this:
>
> >> $text = "The amount of the house is one hundred thousand dollars, and I cannot
>afford that price.";
> >> $X = "amount of the house is";
> >> $Y = ",";
>
> >> $text =~ m,$X(.*?)$Y,;
> >> print $1; ## This prints: " one hundred thousand dollars"
>
>
> Tony wrote:
>
> > I am not sure what the syntax is exactly, but it works great!
>
>
> The regex' technic is not so difficult:
>
> $text contains your string
> =~ means: apply some regex ("regular expression" = search pattern or search and
>replace pattern) on it
> m, ....... , means: what is between the two commata (or some other 2 characters)
>shall be found (m stands for "match").
> $X and $Y are interpolatet; that means you could as well write
> $text =~ m'amount of the house is(.*?),';
> .. means: any character except \n in this case
> ..* means: any count of those characters from zero to infinite
> ? means: as few as possible (= nongreedy search)
> (.*?) means: capture everything within these parens and return it named $1.
>
> Learning is bliss.
>
>
>
>
