Re: Right Associative Matching Example (for Docs)

On Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:04:19 -0500
Bill Yerazunis <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
>    From: Chris Babcock <[email protected]>
> 
>    Use right associative matching when working with tabular data and
> you want to match columns near the end of the line. For example,
> parsing a CSV file with /(?i:":*:email:".+?"([[:print:]]+?)".+?\n)/
> matches the column after :email:
> while /(?ir:":*:email:".+?"([[:print:]]+?)".+?\n)/ matches the last
> column on the line. 
> 
> Excellent example.
> 
> Can you give me example text that you'd see in the .csv?
> 
>     - Bill Yerazunis

...
...,"[email protected]","address1","address2",..."others","phone",
...

/(?i:":*:email:".+?"([[:print:]]+?)".*?\n)/ matches address1
/(?ir:":*:email:".+?"([[:print:]]+?)".*?\n)/ matches phone

(Use * instead of + since you cannot sure of a trailing comma.)

For CSV some variation of this idiom would work:
/(?in:":*:email:".+"([[:print:]]+?)".+?)/ matches phone

This is especially nice for parsing tables where the record is not line
delineated (like HTML).

Chris



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