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I have the following text

blah blah blah blah System Is Working blah blah blah blah

I need a regular expression that will show true only if System Is
Working is missing. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks
Jeff

"jtripo" <> wrote in news:1111514057.175208.228670
@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com:

> I have the following text
>
> blah blah blah blah System Is Working blah blah blah blah
>
> I need a regular expression that will show true only if System Is
> Working is missing. Is there a way to do this?

Why this requirement?

Why can't you use (untested):

my $s = q{blah blah blah blah System Is Working blah blah blah blah};
unless(index($s, q{System Is Working}) > -1) {
# system is not working
}

Sinan

jtripo wrote:
> I have the following text
>
> blah blah blah blah System Is Working blah blah blah blah
>
> I need a regular expression that will show true only if System Is
> Working is missing. Is there a way to do this?

There's no doubt some ugliness you can create using negative lookahead
or somesuch, but it would seem a lot easier and more maintainable to
just do something like:

unless ( $text =~ /System Is Working/ ) {
# Do whatever you wanted to if 'System Is Working' was missing
} else {
# It's there, so do whatever....
}

~Jeff

jtripo <> wrote:
> I have the following text
>
> blah blah blah blah System Is Working blah blah blah blah
>
> I need a regular expression that will show true only if System Is
> Working is missing. Is there a way to do this?


print "missing\n" unless /System Is Working/;

or

print "missing\n" if $_ !~ /System Is Working/;


--
Tad McClellan SGML consulting
Perl programming
Fort Worth, Texas