Regular expression behavior

[Adam Briska]

Given the script:

--------
use strict;
use warnings;

my $text = 'blob:blob';

doit($text);
doit($text);
doit($text);

sub doit
{
my ($aa) = @_;

if( $aa =~ m?[^:]+:.*? ) {
print "Good!\n";
}
else {
print "Bad! \n";
}
}

----

This produces the output:

Good!
Bad!
Bad!

-----

I think that I may have a mistake on the regular expression syntax,
but why does this show one behavior once and another behavior for all
subsequent calls?

If I change the regex to m/[^:]+:.*/ it works fine.

I was under the impression that I could use any delimiter around my
regex, but I seem to be mistaken.

-Adam

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Re: Regular expression behavior

Adam Briska wrote:[color=blue]
> Given the script:
>
> --------
> use strict;
> use warnings;
>
> my $text = 'blob:blob';
>
> doit($text);
> doit($text);
> doit($text);
>
> sub doit
> {
> my ($aa) = @_;
>
> if( $aa =~ m?[^:]+:.*? ) {
> print "Good!\n";
> }
> else {
> print "Bad! \n";
> }
> }
>
> ----
>
> This produces the output:
>
> Good!
> Bad!
> Bad!
>
> -----
>
> I think that I may have a mistake on the regular expression syntax,
> but why does this show one behavior once and another behavior for all
> subsequent calls?
>
> If I change the regex to m/[^:]+:.*/ it works fine.
>
> I was under the impression that I could use any delimiter around my
> regex, but I seem to be mistaken.[/color]

So it seems.

Why didn't you check the docs for the m// operator before asking here?

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