Your '\1' question aside: Your solution requires you to know the number of patterns in the string. For long strings, a regex could be slow. Why not just 'split' on whitespace into an array and then use array indices to easily extract the items you want?
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Ranga Nathan Sent: Friday, October 11, 2002 1:42 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Boston.pm] Calling regex gurus ..A regex question.. I need to parse a string that has multiple occurrences of a pattern that is determined by an embeded count. For example: 02 s1n1 s1n2 3 s2n1 s2n2 s2n3 1 s3n1 4 s4n1 s4n2 s4n3 s4n4 02 is the count and I need to extract s1n1 and s2n2 3 is the count and I need to extract s2n1, s2n2 and s2n3 And so on. So I tried to do: $var = /(.*?)\s+((?:.*?\s+){\1})(.*?)\s+((?:.*?\s+){\3})(.*?)\s+((?:.*?\s+){\5} )/; And was expecting "02" "s1n1 s1n2 " "3" "s2n1 s2n2 s2n3 " "1" "s3n1 " "4" "s4n1 s4n2 s4n3 s4n4 " as matches. This does not work. The \1, \2 etc are not evaluated as 'iterators'. I tried the experimental ?{} too. ---Closing information gaps----- Ranga Nathan, Reliance Technology >>SEVIS solution now! http://goreliance.com >>Live demo at http://any2xml.com/docs/timesheet_demo.shtml<< >>Get free COBOLExplorer at http://goreliance.com/download-products << _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
