On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 15:44:02 -0500, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
Hi,
Not being very versatile in regular expressions I wonder if is possible
to express this:
Find the number of ),( triplets in a string, provided they are not in a
substring that is enclosed in single quotes, ignoring the pair \' in all
cases.
in a regular expression?
The sane approach:
1) remove all occurrences of \' from the string
2) remove all matches of the regex '[^']*' from the remaining string
3) match all instances of ),( in the remaining string and count them
The insane approach (dedicated to Andrew S-W, who is a great perl
aficionado):
#! /usr/bin/perl -w
#read file
open ( FH, "test.txt" );
$string = <FH>;
close ( FH );
# match and count
while ( $string =~ /('(\\'|[^'\\])*'|(\\'|[^'\\)])*|\)[^,\\]|\),[^(])*\),\(/g ) { $count++ }
print "$count\n"