Boris Shor wrote: > Thanks for writing.
Hi Boris, Please don't top-post. It makes it very difficult to get the context of your message. Istead, post following the material to which you are responding. > Your code works for this example but doesn't get exactly > what I need. It's important to me to keep $1 and $2 separate because Yeas > and Nays are paired together (these are votes on bills). But sometimes, you > only have Yeas (eg, a unanimous vote). > > That is why I want to see: > > 123 <- from the first yea ($1) > (nothing) <- no nay! ($2) > 456 <- from the second yea ($1) > 789 <- from the second nay ($2) Why would you want to do this? It seems to me that this is taking information and truning it into meaningless data. A series of numbers piled on top of each other doesn't really communicate much. What do you want to get out of the process as a whole? > > > Hence why I put a ? After the (?:Nay (.*?)x) regexp; That is a bit off. I think we really need a sample of actual data to be able to help you. If the data is of a confidential nature, then you will have to do meaningful substitutions for any matter that is not public. Boilerplate substitutions do not work. So far, I have seen three different formats for your sample string. Each of them would call logically for a somewhat different extraction approach. . My best advice would be not to do it all in one regex. Regular expressions are powerful tools, and amaxingly efficient given the demands placed on them, but they get progressively less efficient as they increase in complexity. If there is any distinct marker that separates the items being voted on, I would strongly recommend that you first split on this marker so that each vote ahs its own element. It is much better to have explicit 0's for the losing side in any unanimous vote. Undefined values only confuse issues. > the idea being this can > appear zero or one times. But if I do this, I get no matches on the 'nays' > or $2. That is a pretty strong indication that the single-regex approach is not the way to go for this job. Can you give us a little more information on what your are trying to accomplish overall? You get there much faster when you know your destination. Joseph -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
