perlfaq6.pod

MSYS在windows下模拟了一个类unix的终端

=head1 NAME

perlfaq6 - Regexes ($Revision: 1.27 $, $Date: 1999/05/23 16:08:30 $)

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This section is surprisingly small because the rest of the FAQ is
littered with answers involving regular expressions.  For example,
decoding a URL and checking whether something is a number are handled
with regular expressions, but those answers are found elsewhere in
this document (in L<perlfaq9>: ``How do I decode or create those %-encodings 
on the web'' and L<perfaq4>: ``How do I determine whether a scalar is
a number/whole/integer/float'', to be precise).

=head2 How can I hope to use regular expressions without creating illegible and unmaintainable code?

Three techniques can make regular expressions maintainable and
understandable.

=over 4

=item Comments Outside the Regex

Describe what you're doing and how you're doing it, using normal Perl
comments.

    # turn the line into the first word, a colon, and the
    # number of characters on the rest of the line
    s/^(\w+)(.*)/ lc($1) . ":" . length($2) /meg;

=item Comments Inside the Regex

The C</x> modifier causes whitespace to be ignored in a regex pattern
(except in a character class), and also allows you to use normal
comments there, too.  As you can imagine, whitespace and comments help
a lot.

C</x> lets you turn this:

    s{<(?:[^>'"]*|".*?"|'.*?')+>}{}gs;

into this:

    s{ <                    # opening angle bracket
        (?:                 # Non-backreffing grouping paren
             [^>'"] *       # 0 or more things that are neither > nor ' nor "
                |           #    or else
             ".*?"          # a section between double quotes (stingy match)
                |           #    or else
             '.*?'          # a section between single quotes (stingy match)
        ) +                 #   all occurring one or more times
       >                    # closing angle bracket
    }{}gsx;                 # replace with nothing, i.e. delete

It's still not quite so clear as prose, but it is very useful for
describing the meaning of each part of the pattern.

=item Different Delimiters

While we normally think of patterns as being delimited with C</>
characters, they can be delimited by almost any character.  L<perlre>
describes this.  For example, the C<s///> above uses braces as
delimiters.  Selecting another delimiter can avoid quoting the
delimiter within the pattern:

    s/\/usr\/local/\/usr\/share/g;	# bad delimiter choice
    s#/usr/local#/usr/share#g;		# better

=back

=head2 I'm having trouble matching over more than one line.  What's wrong?

Either you don't have more than one line in the string you're looking at
(probably), or else you aren't using the correct modifier(s) on your
pattern (possibly).

There are many ways to get multiline data into a string.  If you want
it to happen automatically while reading input, you'll want to set $/
(probably to '' for paragraphs or C<undef> for the whole file) to
allow you to read more than one line at a time.

Read L<perlre> to help you decide which of C</s> and C</m> (or both)
you might want to use: C</s> allows dot to include newline, and C</m>
allows caret and dollar to match next to a newline, not just at the
end of the string.  You do need to make sure that you've actually
got a multiline string in there.

For example, this program detects duplicate words, even when they span
line breaks (but not paragraph ones).  For this example, we don't need
C</s> because we aren't using dot in a regular expression that we want
to cross line boundaries.  Neither do we need C</m> because we aren't
wanting caret or dollar to match at any point inside the record next
to newlines.  But it's imperative that $/ be set to something other
than the default, or else we won't actually ever have a multiline
record read in.

    $/ = '';  		# read in more whole paragraph, not just one line
    while ( <> ) {
	while ( /\b([\w'-]+)(\s+\1)+\b/gi ) {  	# word starts alpha
	    print "Duplicate $1 at paragraph $.\n";
	}
    }

Here's code that finds sentences that begin with "From " (which would
be mangled by many mailers):

    $/ = '';  		# read in more whole paragraph, not just one line
    while ( <> ) {
	while ( /^From /gm ) { # /m makes ^ match next to \n
	    print "leading from in paragraph $.\n";
	}
    }

Here's code that finds everything between START and END in a paragraph:

    undef $/;  		# read in whole file, not just one line or paragraph
    while ( <> ) {
	while ( /START(.*?)END/sm ) { # /s makes . cross line boundaries
	    print "$1\n";
	}
    }

=head2 How can I pull out lines between two patterns that are themselves on different lines?

You can use Perl's somewhat exotic C<..> operator (documented in
L<perlop>):

    perl -ne 'print if /START/ .. /END/' file1 file2 ...

If you wanted text and not lines, you would use

    perl -0777 -ne 'print "$1\n" while /START(.*?)END/gs' file1 file2 ...

But if you want nested occurrences of C<START> through C<END>, you'll
run up against the problem described in the question in this section
on matching balanced text.

Here's another example of using C<..>:

    while (<>) {
        $in_header =   1  .. /^$/;
        $in_body   = /^$/ .. eof();
	# now choose between them
    } continue {
	reset if eof();		# fix $.
    } 

=head2 I put a regular expression into $/ but it didn't work. What's wrong?

$/ must be a string, not a regular expression.  Awk has to be better
for something. :-)

Actually, you could do this if you don't mind reading the whole file
into memory:

    undef $/;
    @records = split /your_pattern/, <FH>;

The Net::Telnet module (available from CPAN) has the capability to
wait for a pattern in the input stream, or timeout if it doesn't
appear within a certain time.

    ## Create a file with three lines.
    open FH, ">file";
    print FH "The first line\nThe second line\nThe third line\n";
    close FH;

    ## Get a read/write filehandle to it.
    $fh = new FileHandle "+<file";

    ## Attach it to a "stream" object.
    use Net::Telnet;
    $file = new Net::Telnet (-fhopen => $fh);

    ## Search for the second line and print out the third.
    $file->waitfor('/second line\n/');
    print $file->getline;

=head2 How do I substitute case insensitively on the LHS while preserving case on the RHS?

Here's a lovely Perlish solution by Larry Rosler.  It exploits
properties of bitwise xor on ASCII strings.

    $_= "this is a TEsT case";

    $old = 'test';
    $new = 'success';

    s{(\Q$old\E)}
     { uc $new | (uc $1 ^ $1) .
	(uc(substr $1, -1) ^ substr $1, -1) x
	    (length($new) - length $1)
     }egi;

    print;

And here it is as a subroutine, modelled after the above:

    sub preserve_case($$) {
	my ($old, $new) = @_;
	my $mask = uc $old ^ $old;

	uc $new | $mask .
	    substr($mask, -1) x (length($new) - length($old))        
    }

    $a = "this is a TEsT case";
    $a =~ s/(test)/preserve_case($1, "success")/egi;
    print "$a\n";

This prints:

    this is a SUcCESS case

Just to show that C programmers can write C in any programming language,
if you prefer a more C-like solution, the following script makes the
substitution have the same case, letter by letter, as the original.
(It also happens to run about 240% slower than the Perlish solution runs.)
If the substitution has more characters than the string being substituted,
the case of the last character is used for the rest of the substitution.

    # Original by Nathan Torkington, massaged by Jeffrey Friedl
    #
    sub preserve_case($$)
    {
        my ($old, $new) = @_;
        my ($state) = 0; # 0 = no change; 1 = lc; 2 = uc
        my ($i, $oldlen, $newlen, $c) = (0, length($old), length($new));
        my ($len) = $oldlen < $newlen ? $oldlen : $newlen;

        for ($i = 0; $i < $len; $i++) {
            if ($c = substr($old, $i, 1), $c =~ /[\W\d_]/) {
                $state = 0;
            } elsif (lc $c eq $c) {
                substr($new, $i, 1) = lc(substr($new, $i, 1));
                $state = 1;
            } else {
                substr($new, $i, 1) = uc(substr($new, $i, 1));
                $state = 2;
            }
        }
        # finish up with any remaining new (for when new is longer than old)
        if ($newlen > $oldlen) {
            if ($state == 1) {
                substr($new, $oldlen) = lc(substr($new, $oldlen));
            } elsif ($state == 2) {
                substr($new, $oldlen) = uc(substr($new, $oldlen));
            }
        }
        return $new;
    }

=head2 How can I make C<\w> match national character sets?

See L<perllocale>.

=head2 How can I match a locale-smart version of C</[a-zA-Z]/>?

One alphabetic character would be C</[^\W\d_]/>, no matter what locale
you're in.  Non-alphabetics would be C</[\W\d_]/> (assuming you don't
consider an underscore a letter).

=head2 How can I quote a variable to use in a regex?

The Perl parser will expand $variable and @variable references in
regular expressions unless the delimiter is a single quote.  Remember,
too, that the right-hand side of a C<s///> substitution is considered
a double-quoted string (see L<perlop> for more details).  Remember
also that any regex special characters will be acted on unless you
precede the substitution with \Q.  Here's an example:

    $string = "to die?";
    $lhs = "die?";
    $rhs = "sleep, no more";

    $string =~ s/\Q$lhs/$rhs/;
    # $string is now "to sleep no more"

Without the \Q, the regex would also spuriously match "di".

=head2 What is C</o> really for?

Using a variable in a regular expression match forces a re-evaluation
(and perhaps recompilation) each time the regular expression is
encountered.  The C</o> modifier locks in the regex the first time
it's used.  This always happens in a constant regular expression, and
in fact, the pattern was compiled into the internal format at the same
time your entire program was.

Use of C</o> is irrelevant unless variable interpolation is used in
the pattern, and if so, the regex engine will neither know nor care
whether the variables change after the pattern is evaluated the I<very
first> time.

C</o> is often used to gain an extra measure of efficiency by not
performing subsequent evaluations when you know it won't matter
(because you know the variables won't change), or more rarely, when
you don't want the regex to notice if they do.

For example, here's a "paragrep" program:

    $/ = '';  # paragraph mode
    $pat = shift;
    while (<>) {
        print if /$pat/o;
    }

=head2 How do I use a regular expression to strip C style comments from a file?

While this actually can be done, it's much harder than you'd think.
For example, this one-liner

    perl -0777 -pe 's{/\*.*?\*/}{}gs' foo.c

will work in many but not all cases.  You see, it's too simple-minded for
certain kinds of C programs, in particular, those with what appear to be
comments in quoted strings.  For that, you'd need something like this,
created by Jeffrey Friedl and later modified by Fred Curtis.

    $/ = undef;
    $_ = <>;
    s#/\*[^*]*\*+([^/*][^*]*\*+)*/|("(\\.|[^"\\])*"|'(\\.|[^'\\])*'|.[^/"'\\]*)#$2#gs
    print;

This could, of course, be more legibly written with the C</x> modifier, adding
whitespace and comments.  Here it is expanded, courtesy of Fred Curtis.

    s{
       /\*         ##  Start of /* ... */ comment
       [^*]*\*+    ##  Non-* followed by 1-or-more *'s
       (
         [^/*][^*]*\*+
       )*          ##  0-or-more things which don't start with /
                   ##    but do end with '*'
       /           ##  End of /* ... */ comment

     |         ##     OR  various things which aren't comments:

       (
         "           ##  Start of " ... " string
         (
           \\.           ##  Escaped char
         |               ##    OR
           [^"\\]        ##  Non "\
         )*
         "           ##  End of " ... " string

       |         ##     OR

         '           ##  Start of ' ... ' string
         (
           \\.           ##  Escaped char
         |               ##    OR
           [^'\\]        ##  Non '\
         )*
         '           ##  End of ' ... ' string