[ILUG] Perl regex question

[Niall O Broin]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2000 at 06:04:29PM +0100, Dermot McGahon wrote:

> Can MB1 and MB2 be contained within <data>. If not then you should
> just use the fact that they are always there and match up to them.

They can, in principle, but they never will be, in practice.

> Untested. If you send on sample data I will test this or other
> solutions I may come up with:
> 
>  while (/$MB1$MB2(.)..(.*)(?!$MB1$MB2)/) { $data{$1} = $2 }

This is a nice Perlish solution, but unfortunately it won't work because the
last <data> won't have MB1,MB2 after it :-( 

I ended up using something like this

while ($buffer =~ /($MB1$MB2)([$markers])(..)/g) {
  $length = unpack("n", $3);
  $item = $2;
  $buffer =~ /(.{$length})/g;
  $data{$item} = $1;
}

but I really had hoped that I could mangle the two regex and the length
calculation into one regex - apparently it may be possible in 5.6.




Regards,


Niall