Ronald, Chris, Man, do I feel stupid. It was my inappropriate use of 'while (..) {....}' that was the culprit. Thanks! Scott Ronald J. Kimball wrote... >.*? at the beginning of a regex is generally unnecessary. The regex engine >already handles stepping through the target string until it finds a match. > >.*? at the end of a regex will never, ever match anything. > >A straightforward regex: > >/\$(\w+)->?/ Interesting, because that's one of the first ones I used, and it didn't work and still doesn't in this case. Seems reasonable since (quoting from Perl5 pocket ref.) "Each Charater matches itself, unless it is one of the special characters +?.*^$()[]{}|\ ...". On a related note, I had originally used /\$(\w+)/ to find scalars, and found that it was not matching in every case. So I tried /.*?\$(\w+).*?/ and in every test found them all, which makes no sense to me since I see no difference between the minimum of zero or more occurances(zero) of something, and nothing at all. on 3/7/99 5:18 AM, Chris Sansom wrote... >Scott, I think the problem is the fact that you have both types of quote in >this string. Yes, but in actual use it is parsing a script and $q is a line from 'while (<SCRIPT>) {...' . The script opens the target script(itself) just like any other file reading one line at a time. Is there any reason that it wouldn't be parsed just like any other text file? Scott >At 22:55 -0500 6/3/99, Scott Prince spoke thusly: >>I'm playing with a sub routine to parse a script and gather a list of >>variables, but there's one I can't seem to get a handle on. >> >># $q, is the string, in this case... >># >># "#$hashref->{'hjkjg'} = "isahashreftoo";3sdfgdkjldskjd sdjkdfsklj" >> >>while ($q =~ /.*?\$(\w+)-.*?/) >>{ >>$xref = $1; >>$q =~ s/\$$xref//; >> if ((!(defined($hashes{$xref}))) && ($xref !~ /arrays|hashes|scalars/)) >> { >> $hashes{$xref} = 1; >> } >>} >> >>I just want to match '$hashref-' or '$hashref->'. I'm pretty sure that >>the problem is the '-'. Any ideas? ===== Want to unsubscribe from this list? ===== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-request@macperl.org