perl regular expressions return last matched occurence?

[Dustin D.]

If I attempt to crop a string using regular expressions and the ()
operator for grouping, Perl always seems to return the last match.
For instance, if I have the following:

my $test = "a0\nb0\nc0\na1 \nb1\nc1\n";
$test =~ s/.*(\w\d\n).*/$1/s;
print "$test";

The output would be:

c1

I don't understand why it's not a0? Any ideas?

Thanks,
Dustin

[Rich]

Re: perl regular expressions return last matched occurence?

blackened@austi n.rr.com (Dustin D.) wrote in message news:<7259a2ce. 0308261512.2775 d3cf@posting.go ogle.com>...[color=blue]
> If I attempt to crop a string using regular expressions and the ()
> operator for grouping, Perl always seems to return the last match.
> For instance, if I have the following:
>
> my $test = "a0\nb0\nc0\na1 \nb1\nc1\n";
> $test =~ s/.*(\w\d\n).*/$1/s;
> print "$test";
>
> The output would be:
>
> c1
>
> I don't understand why it's not a0? Any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> Dustin[/color]

It's all about greed.

Your .* is being greedy and going to the last group of word characters
which is c1. To stop it from being greedy add a ? after the first .*
and it should work the way you expect

Rich