Re: [MacPerl] Newbie: Word matching?

[John-Michael Keyes <jk@infohiway.com>]

Greetings Francis,

One of the coolest things 'bout perl is context. Things mean different
things in different places.  My regex is still developing but I think
here's what's going on...

the ^ means beginning of the string in regex, unless you put it in [^ ].
Then it means Not... So your matching is really saying if the string starts
with anything but a space. Might try " /^\s?$String\s?$/i " where we look
at either the beginning of the line (notice context) followed by 0 or 1
spaces, your string and either a space or the end of line.(case
insensitive) I think this'll replace the entire if block:

&OutputSearch if $Handle=~/^\s?$String\s?$/i;

Good luck, 'member I'm still working through my own regex learning curve,
so I could be hallucinating.

JMK
>
>>Hello all,
>>
>>
>>I used regular expressions before in UNIX and vi, but now I'm stuck. I am
>>using MacPerl to write CGIs for a web site I'm desiging. I want users to
>>be able to search a database of Handles by either partitial or whole word
>>match. If the search is partitial there is no problem, but I can't get a
>>regular expression to work which *returns word matches*. The script
>>compiles OK, but won't return any match even is there are.
>>
>>
>>Part of the script:
>>
>>#Find $String in $Handle
>>if ($values{"Word"} eq "Entire")
>>{
>>  if ($Handle =~ /[^ ]$String[\$ ]/) { &OutputSearch(); }
>>} else {
>>  if ($Handle =~ /$String/) { &OutputSearch(); }
>>}
>>
>>The first regular expression /[^ ]$String[$ ]/ won't work and I have no
>>idea why. I even tried to replace the spaces with \s, but still nothing
>>happens... I am trying to search for the beginning of a line or a space,
>>followed by the string, followed by an end of line or space.
>>
>>Can someone please tell how the regular expression should be? Or another
>>way the achieving the same thing... Any help will be greatly appreciated.
>>Forgive me if this question is rather a dumb one, but I can't solve it
>>after reading the manual and consulting a Beginners Perl book.
>>
>>Thanks in advance,
>>
>>
>>Francis
>>Francis.VanRoie@khk.be
>
>
>

John-Michael Keyes - jk@infohiway.com
http://www.infohiway.com