Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks Bob
Do you know where your variables are?

Re: regular expression and grep function questions

by 7stud (Deacon)
on Mar 02, 2013 at 07:35 UTC ( #1021397=note: print w/ replies, xml ) Need Help??

in reply to regular expression and grep function questions

What does "\z" mean in Perl?

Some people use the flags /xms as the default starting point for every regex. If you do that, then:

\A  \z   --beginning and end of the entire string
^   $    --beginning and end of a "line" within the string

Then just forget about \Z, which is unnecessary.

use strict; use warnings; use 5.010; my $string = "HELLO\nWORLD\nGOODBYE"; my @patterns = ( '\A (.)', #Match start of entire string followed by any char '^ (.)', #Match start of every line followed by any char '(.) \z', #Match any char followed by end of the entire string '(.) $', #Match any char followed by end of a line ); for my $pattern (@patterns) { my @matches = $string =~ /$pattern/gxms; say "@matches"; say '*' x 20; } --output:-- H ******************** H W G ******************** E ******************** O D E ********************

I remember grep only takes two input variables, one is the expression and the other one is an array.



A list is a series of comma separated values, e.g. 1, 'a', 2, 'b'. So if you give perl an array along with a scalar value in a spot where perl expects a list, then perl extracts the values from the array and adds the scalar value to the end, creating one list.

That phenomena happens in a lot of places in perl. As hippo explained, look what happens if you call a sub with two arrays:

use strict; use warnings; use 5.010; sub do_stuff { my @x = shift; my @y = shift; say "@x"; say "@y"; } my @arr1 = (10, 20); my @arr2 = ('a', 'b'); do_stuff(@arr1, @arr2);

What do you expect the output to be?

When you call the function perl 'unwinds' the first array into a list of comma separated values, and perl does the same with the second array, creating one big list--as if you called the function like this:

do_stuff(10, 20, 'a', 'b');

That list then gets assigned to the array named @_. So when you shift one value from @_ and assign the value to the array @x, it's as if you wrote:

my @x = 10;

And in that line, because there is an array on the left, which expects a list on the right, perl converts the scalar 10 to the list (10) giving you this:

my @x = (10);

Comment on Re: regular expression and grep function questions
Select or Download Code

Log In?

What's my password?
Create A New User
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://1021397]
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this? | Other CB clients
Other Users?
Others chanting in the Monastery: (7)
As of 2014-03-15 17:36 GMT
Find Nodes?
    Voting Booth?

    Have you used a cryptocurrency?

    Results (320 votes), past polls