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"John W. Krahn" <> wrote:
>Jürgen Exner wrote:
>> Jürgen Exner <> wrote:

>>> [^\,] one of the three characters caret, backslash, comma
>>
>> Ooops, correction. Make that
>> [^\,] any single character, that is not backslash or comma
>
>You were right the first time. A backslash before a normal character in
>a double quoted string is superfluous.

Yes, but:
- this is not a double quoted string but a RE character class. So the
backslash would be taken literally ARAIR.
- My mistake was to not consider that ^ at the beginning of a character
class indicates the negation of that class.

jue

Martijn Lievaart wrote:
> On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:06:35 -0800, wrote:
>
>> On Jan 9, 2:39 pm, Martijn Lievaart <m...@rtij.nl.invlalid> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:00:18 -0800, ame...@iwc.net wrote:
>>>> I have the following expression in my Perl script:
>>>> if (/^"([^\,].+)"\,"$/)
>
> (snip)
>
>> I might add, the input file looks like this:
>>
>> "#ABC","
>> [
>> ","ABC Dispensing designs, manufactures and services dispensing systems
> (snip)
>
> Yes, that regex will match the first line.
>
> $ perl -e 'print "yes\n" if "\"#ABC\",\"" =~ /^"([^\,].+)"\,"$/'
> yes
>
> (Note extra backslashes in the input line because this is executed from
> the commandline)
>
> BTW, the backslashes before the commas are completely unneeded.
>
> $ perl -e 'print "yes\n" if "\"#ABC\",\"" =~ /^"([^,].+)","$/'
> yes

Actually, none of the backslashes are really needed:

perl -e 'print qq/yes\n/ if q/"#ABC","/ =~ /^"([^,].+)","$/'



John
--
Perl isn't a toolbox, but a small machine shop where you
can special-order certain sorts of tools at low cost and
in short order. -- Larry Wall

Jürgen Exner wrote:
> "John W. Krahn" <> wrote:
>> Jürgen Exner wrote:
>>> Jürgen Exner <> wrote:
>
>>>> [^\,] one of the three characters caret, backslash, comma
>>> Ooops, correction. Make that
>>> [^\,] any single character, that is not backslash or comma
>> You were right the first time. A backslash before a normal character in
>> a double quoted string is superfluous.
>
> Yes, but:
> - this is not a double quoted string but a RE character class. So the
> backslash would be taken literally ARAIR.

Unless the regular expression uses single quote delimiters the pattern
is first interpolated as if it were a double quoted string.

perldoc perlop

Read through the sections "Quote and Quote-like Operators", "Regexp
Quote-Like Operators" and "Gory details of parsing quoted constructs".



John
--
Perl isn't a toolbox, but a small machine shop where you
can special-order certain sorts of tools at low cost and
in short order. -- Larry Wall

<> wrote:
>
> I have the following expression in my Perl script:
^^
^^
> if (/^"([^\,].+)"\,"$/)
>
> Although I know that it is checking to see if the string starts with
> some characters, it is not working for my input file.
>
> Can someone explain to me in english what it is doing???


Since you wrote it, you should be able to do that yourself.

Or did you mean "in someone else's Perl script" instead?




--
Tad McClellan
email: perl -le "print scalar reverse qq/moc.noitatibaher\100cmdat/"