regex help

[apertosa]

Hi, hope some of you Perl folks might be able to help

Problem:
I have a string that contains an expression.

An expression can be: one or more variables, one or more operators, another variable (or number).

So my expression looks like this (for example):

-20.0 * pvs_variable1 + pvs_variable2

Note that I do not know how many operands and operators the expression contains.

I need to be able to extract the operands and the operators of the expression, however many there might be.

How can I do this?

Thanks for your help.

 

[MillerH]

What have you tried thus far?

Is there any reason that a simple split can't accomplish what you want? In other words, is the data always spaced judiciously?

[url=http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/my.html][black][b]my[/b][/black][/url] [blue]$expression[/blue] = [red]'[/red][purple]-20.0 * pvs_variable1 + pvs_variable2[/purple][red]'[/red][red];[/red]

[black][b]my[/b][/black] [blue]@components[/blue] = [url=http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/split.html][black][b]split[/b][/black][/url] [red]'[/red][purple] [/purple][red]'[/red], [blue]$expression[/blue][red];[/red]

[url=http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/print.html][black][b]print[/b][/black][/url] [url=http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/join.html][black][b]join[/b][/black][/url] [red]'[/red][purple],[/purple][red]'[/red], [blue]@components[/blue][red];[/red]

- M