[wplug] regex help

[Brian Medley]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 06:45:03PM -0500, James O'Kane wrote:

> > If so, then consider matching the following line:
> > 
> >     <td>One Cell</td><td>Two Cell</td>
> > 
> > I believe that /<td.*?>/ will find "<td>One Cell</td>" and /<td.*>/
> > would match the entire line.  Basically, the way I think about it is
> > that w/ greedy the beginning anchor is set as soon as possible and
> > the ending anchor is set as late as possible.  With non-greedy, the
> > beginning anchor is the same, but the ending anchor is set as soon as
> > possible.
> 
> perl disagrees. # comments after the #'s
> 
> [jo2y at dax jo2y]$ perl -de 0  # -d starts the debugger -e 0 executes '0' 
> 
> Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.19
> Editor support available.
> 
> Enter h or `h h' for help, or `man perldebug' for more help.
> 
> main::(-e:1):   0
>   DB<1> $|=1                          # Turn off IO buffering
> 
>   DB<2> $string = "<td>One Cell</td><td>Two Cell</td>"
> 
>   DB<3> $string =~ /(<td.*>)/ ; print $1
> <td>One Cell</td><td>Two Cell</td>
>   DB<4> $string =~ /(<td.*?>)/ ; print $1
> <td>

Ack!  I must be using an old version of perl in my head...:)  That's
what I get for not doing proper testing.

  DB<2> x $string =~ /(<td>.*?>)/           
  0  '<td>One Cell</td>'

So, one possible approach is to change it to /<td>.*?>/.  If I had read
my own paragraph about stopping as soon as possible, I would have
realized my own error...:)

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