[thelist] Reg Ex - everything except a phrase

[Joshua Olson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Kaufman" <david at gigawatt.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 9:05 AM


> if, however fred may pop up *multiple* times in the string, notice that
> this simple technique excludes only the *last* fred:
>
> case multifred:
>
>   my $d = 'i, not fred, am me, whilst fred is not!';
>   $d =~ s/^(.*)(?:fred)(.*)$/$1$2/; print $d, "\n";
>
> prints "i, not fred, am me, whilst  is not!",
>
> thanks to greedy matching.  if you need to match everything except
> multiple freds, a simple loop is usually best:
>
>   $d =~ s/^(.*)(?:fred)(.*)$/$1$2/ while $d =~ /fred/; print $d, "\n";
>
> prints "i, not , am me, whilst  is not!"

Dave,

You da man!  I'm not familiar with Perl syntax... could you do me a favor
and explain what this line does:

$d =~ s/^(.*)(?:fred)(.*)$/$1$2/ while $d =~ /fred/; print $d, "\n";

Thanks.

<><><><><><><><><><>
Joshua Olson
Web Application Engineer
WAE Tech Inc.
http://www.waetech.com
706.210.0168