Non greedy pattern matching

[columb]

I'm trying to work on xml without loading the xml parsing bits. Here's what I've got so far

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $string2 = '
<node description>
  <hook>
    <text> Blurb about Red Hat
    </text>
  </hook>
</node>
<node second node>
  <hook>hooky AIX thing
  </hook>
</node>
<node third node>
  <hook>hooky solaris thing
  </hook>
</node>';
$string2 =~ s/\<node.*?Solaris.*?\<\/node\>/replacement /msi;
print $string2;

Now, according to me this should just take out the third solaris node but the result is the whole thing is deleted.

I've tried looking everywhere and I'm assured that the .*? pattern is non gready list of any characters. What am I doing wrong?


On the internet no one knows you're a dog

Columb Healy

 

[prex1]

You should raise and answer the question: is the whole string being captured by that regex? The answer is yes, as it starts with [tt]<node[/tt] , continues with some chars, has the word [tt]solaris[/tt] and ends with [tt]</node>[/tt].
The point is that any number of chars means exactly what it says.
Try this
[tt]$string2 =~ s/<node.*>\s*<hook>[\w\s]*Solaris[\w\s]*<\/hook>\s*<\/node>/replacement /i;[/tt]
but other solutions also exist.
Note that modifiers [tt]m[/tt] and [tt]s[/tt] are somewhat in contrast each other and [tt]m[/tt] is of no use if '^' or '$' are not in the pattern.

Franco

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