On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 03:59:10PM +0100, nemesis wrote:
>
>Hi all,
>
>I have a bunch of jokes that people have forwarded me over the years[1] and
>they all have really bad formatting [2]. I am lazy and want to do as much
>formatting of the jokes as I can automatically. I have tried this piece of
>code to get rid of any '>' or whitespace charachters before the 'beginning'
>of each line of the text, but it just returns the same text as before:
>
>foreach my $line (@body) {
> $_ = $line;
> s/^(?:>|\s)*(.*)$/$1/g;
> print;
>}
>
>Any ideas what I am doing wrong here[3]
This is rather more complex than it needs to be. Why not:
foreach (@body) { # it goes into $_ automatically
s/^(>\s*)+//;
print;
}
? (It works on your example.) Or even s/^[>\s]+//; (as Nick's pointed
out while I was writing this)?
The short answer is that it's not your regex that's wrong, it's messing
about with $_.
Roger
