[Buffalo-pm] regexp returning count of pattern.

[John Macdonald]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 03:42:51PM -0500, Josh Johnson wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kevin Eye" <eye at buffalo.edu>
> To: "Josh Johnson" <joshj at linuxmail.org>, buffalo-pm at mail.pm.org
> Subject: Re: [Buffalo-pm] regexp returning count of pattern.
> Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 12:30:41 -0500
> 
> > 
> > The /g flag on regex substitutions returns the number of substitutions.
> > 
> > Try this:
> > 
> > $text = 'abcba';
> > $num_substitutions = $text =~ /b/d/g;
> > 
> > $num_substitutions is 2 because two b's were replaced with d's.
> > 
> > You can do this without substitutions to count the number of matches, too.
> 
> I can only get this to work with substitution. How can I do it 
> without? Its not a big deal, I can work around it if needbe. But 
> now I'm running into another problem: How can I match a *string* 
> one or more times? I thought I'd start out with baby-steps with 
> this. But that's not gonna happen. Here's my ultimate goal:
> 
> To convert multiple  &nbsp;'s generated by an html editor into some 
> xml for me. So "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" would become 
> '<spaces="4"/>' or something like that. So the problem is, I don't 
> want to count *all* &nbsp;'s, I just want to count the ones that 
> are in sequence.
> 
> John: I tried your method. I see where you are going with it, and it seems like it should work, but I can't get it to.
> 
> If I could match one or more strings I could get something to work. But I only know how to get regex's to match one or more characters.

    $string =~ s/((\&nbsp;){2,})/'<spaces="'.(length($2)/6).'/>'/eg;

(This gets harder if there are extra characters allowed
within the &nbsp; run, though.)

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