Regex question

[capitano]

I want to use a regular expression to do the following:

$text =~ s/abc([.\s]+)abc/cba$1cba/g;

Essentially, I want to replace: abc(some text)abc
with: cba(some text)cba

So, I'm trying to use ([.\s]+) to move the (some text) into the substitution area with the standard $1.

However, this regex doesn't capture parentheses, or any other kind of puctuation. Is there a regex that is a "catch all" for alphanumerics, spaces, AND punctuations? ([.\s]+) obviously doensn't work.

Thanks,
Bryan

 

[raider2001]

Use a '.' to match every character. Note that you also need to add a '?' to make the match non-greedy. The following should work:

$text =~ s/abc(.+?)abc/cba$1cba/g;

 

[tanderso]

Right, a dot (.) inside of a character class ([]) isn't a wildcard... it's just a dot. Getting rid of the character class as raider2001 suggested should fix your problem.

As for the greediness, you have to decide what you want to do if you have a string like "abcxyzabcxyzabc". Do you want to match just "xyz" (non-greedy) or "xyzabcxyz" (greedy)?
Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.

http://www.oac-design.com