On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 03:38:58PM -0800, Rich Morin wrote: > On occasion, I have found it useful to cobble up a "little language" > that allows me to generate a list of items, using a wild-card or some > other syntax, as: > > foo[0-9][0-9] yields foo00, foo01, ... > > I'm wondering whether Perl should have a similar capability, using REs.
Dominus has an example of an 'odometer' written using closures. If you want to specify a simple sequence like this using a regex, then you need to parse the regex (but in reverse). Alternatively, you could write a generic odometer generator generator that takes a series of scalars and lists: my $generator = make_generator('foo', [0..9], [0..9]); while ($_ = $generator->()) { ## progressively generate foo00, foo01, ... } Z.