
Jasmine
Administrator
Mar 15, 2001, 6:09 AM
Post #1 of 1
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What good is \G in a regular expression?
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What good is \G in a regular expression? The notation \G is used in a match or substitution in conjunction the /g modifier (and ignored if there's no /g) to anchor the regular expression to the point just past where the last match occurred, i.e. the pos() point. For example, suppose you had a line of text quoted in standard mail and Usenet notation, (that is, with leading > characters), and you want change each leading > into a corresponding :. You could do so in this way:
s/^(>+)/':' x length($1)/gem; Or, using \G, the much simpler (and faster): A more sophisticated use might involve a tokenizer. The following lex-like example is courtesy of Jeffrey Friedl. It did not work in 5.003 due to bugs in that release, but does work in 5.004 or better. (Note the use of /c, which prevents a failed match with /g from resetting the search position back to the beginning of the string.)
while (<>) { chomp; PARSER: { m/ \G( \d+\b )/gcx && do { print "number: $1\n"; redo; }; m/ \G( \w+ )/gcx && do { print "word: $1\n"; redo; }; m/ \G( \s+ )/gcx && do { print "space: $1\n"; redo; }; m/ \G( [^\w\d]+ )/gcx && do { print "other: $1\n"; redo; }; } } Of course, that could have been written as
while (<>) { chomp; PARSER: { if ( /\G( \d+\b )/gcx { print "number: $1\n"; redo PARSER; } if ( /\G( \w+ )/gcx { print "word: $1\n"; redo PARSER; } if ( /\G( \s+ )/gcx { print "space: $1\n"; redo PARSER; } if ( /\G( [^\w\d]+ )/gcx { print "other: $1\n"; redo PARSER; } } } But then you lose the vertical alignment of the regular expressions.
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