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Hi all,
I have a small program that crawls my filesystem, checking filenames
and doing useful stuff.
The heart of it, of course is a pattern match line, where the filename
under check is compared to a pattern.
Everything was running perfectly until I got:

/0ale/excursions/digital/manuals/O'Reilly Perl CD Bookshelf v2.0/
advprog/examples/Extending/Typemaps_with_XS/00comment.txt exists,
updating it

Nested quantifiers in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/^\s+Car_c++ <--
HERE _obj ! (\S.*)/ at /0ale/excursions/digital/script/comment-dev
line 271.


(1st line is my prog. output, 2nd line is the error)
apart from the fun fact that the error came while crawling the Perl
Bookshelf, I immediately noticed that names containing special chars
(as that damn directory Car_c++_obj) can bring trouble.
How can I be sure that a generic string read in $_ can be safely put
in a RE, without its chars being misunderstood as RE special chars???

Thanks!

Alessandro Magni

wrote:
> I have a small program that crawls my filesystem, checking filenames
> and doing useful stuff.
> The heart of it, of course is a pattern match line, where the filename
> under check is compared to a pattern.
> Everything was running perfectly until I got:
>
> /0ale/excursions/digital/manuals/O'Reilly Perl CD Bookshelf v2.0/
> advprog/examples/Extending/Typemaps_with_XS/00comment.txt exists,
> updating it
>
> Nested quantifiers in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/^\s+Car_c++ <--
> HERE _obj ! (\S.*)/ at /0ale/excursions/digital/script/comment-dev
> line 271.
>
>
> (1st line is my prog. output, 2nd line is the error)
> apart from the fun fact that the error came while crawling the Perl
> Bookshelf, I immediately noticed that names containing special chars
> (as that damn directory Car_c++_obj) can bring trouble.
> How can I be sure that a generic string read in $_ can be safely put
> in a RE, without its chars being misunderstood as RE special chars???

perldoc -f quotemeta

--
Gunnar Hjalmarsson
Email: http://www.gunnar.cc/cgi-bin/contact.pl

thank you,
I didnt know about this particular kind of quote - it sertainly works
now with a simple $q=quotemeta($_);

Alessandro

On Jun 28, 5:06 pm, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <nore...@gunnar.cc> wrote:
> alexxx.ma...@gmail.com wrote:
> > I have a small program that crawls my filesystem, checking filenames
> > and doing useful stuff.
> > The heart of it, of course is a pattern match line, where the filename
> > under check is compared to a pattern.
> > Everything was running perfectly until I got:
>
> > /0ale/excursions/digital/manuals/O'Reilly Perl CD Bookshelf v2.0/
> > advprog/examples/Extending/Typemaps_with_XS/00comment.txt exists,
> > updating it
>
> > Nested quantifiers in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/^\s+Car_c++ <--
> > HERE _obj ! (\S.*)/ at /0ale/excursions/digital/script/comment-dev
> > line 271.
>
> > (1st line is my prog. output, 2nd line is the error)
> > apart from the fun fact that the error came while crawling the Perl
> > Bookshelf, I immediately noticed that names containing special chars
> > (as that damn directory Car_c++_obj) can bring trouble.
> > How can I be sure that a generic string read in $_ can be safely put
> > in a RE, without its chars being misunderstood as RE special chars???
>
> perldoc -f quotemeta
>
> --
> Gunnar Hjalmarsson
> Email:http://www.gunnar.cc/cgi-bin/contact.pl

On Jun 28, 11:37 am, "alexxx.ma...@gmail.com" <alexxx.ma...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Jun 28, 5:06 pm, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <nore...@gunnar.cc> wrote:
> > perldoc -f quotemeta

> I didnt know about this particular kind of quote - it
> sertainly works now with a simple $q=quotemeta($_);

Read the doc Gunnar pointed you to again. It's simpler than that.
Just use the \Q (and possibly \E) characters within your regexp.

perldoc perlre

Paul Lalli