location of regular expression match

[bob]

I apologize for another newbie question. How does one obtain the
starting character position of all regular expression matches in a
line or a paragraph?
Thank you.

[Amir Kadic]

bob wrote:

> I apologize for another newbie question. How does one obtain the
> starting character position of all regular expression matches in a
> line or a paragraph?

One way I can think of is using pos() in a loop:


foreach $token (qw#foo bar#) {
$position= pos($line),"\n" if $line =~ /$token/g;
# now do something with it
}

I _hope_ there is a more elegant WTDI.

Amir

[Amir Kadic]

I wrote:

> $position= pos($line),"\n" if $line =~ /$token/g;

Please forget the q(,"\n")

This was originally a print(), but then I thought,
'that man wants to _obtain_, not print the positions'...:)

Amir

[mooseshoes]

<snip>

> I apologize for another newbie question. How does one obtain the
> starting character position of all regular expression matches in a
> line or a paragraph?
> Thank you.

It is stored in the @- array (ie. $-[0] is the position at the start of a
match). Use //g modifier and \G anchor as needed. Check out perlretut and
perlre for more info.

Moose