[Nottingham] Perl Regular Expression Query.

[Paul Sladen]

On Fri, 17 Jan 2003, Robert Postill wrote:
> I've been at this with the question marks because I was told the regex
> engine would swallow the intermediate @ signs.  So thanks for that.

After a character, [..] set, or (block) you can use:

  ?    optionally match this
  *    match zero of more of this
  +    match one of more of this
  {,}  match upto, less than, more than, or an exact number of

Therefore the Question Mark and Star don't make sense together;  if you
don't want the fields between the `@' to contain `@' themselves (non-greedy
matching), you can do:

  /@([^@]+)@/

Which means that with "@foo@bar@" you'll end up with just the "foo" and not
"foo@bar".  The brackets () are selecting what you'll get out in the
positional matches afterwards.

	-Paul
-- 
Nottingham, GB