how to match multichar atoms in regexp?

[expostfacto]

if ('bbbbbasasdf' =~ /([^(asdf)]*)/) {
print $1;
}

above prints bbbbb when bbbbbas is desired. Is there any way to do this with regexp? I really really really don't want to have to learn parse::recdescent.

 

[hmerrill]

/([^(asdf)]*)/

The square brackets means character class - each character in between the square brackets is a member of a character class that you are defining.

When you say [^(asdf)] you are really saying match any character which is not(^) one of the characters "(", "a", "s",
"d", "f", or &quot".

This took some research - I looked in "Programming Perl" - 3rd edition p. 166 to get a definition of the "caret" - 3rd paragraph down.

Why not use something like this:

if ('bbbbbasasdf' =~ /(\w+)asdf/) {
print "$1\n";
}

HTH. Hardy Merrill