[San-Diego-pm] Recompiling global substitution RE?

Reuben Settergren ruberad at gmail.com
Fri Mar 19 22:14:13 PDT 2010


Hi all,

I've got a Perl problem that's got me stumped. Any help would be
appreciated.

Consider the following small perl program, which exemplifies a problem I am
having with a script generates HTML sw verification reports, and is supposed
to colorize numbers according to how they verified against what the numbers
are supposed to be. To make things simpler, “<span color=”green”>1<span>” is
abbreviated as “sg1s“:

#! /bin/perl
$s = "1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3";          # what I have
$t = "sg1s 2 3 sr1s 2 3 1 sy2s 3"; # what I want
@nums = qw(1 1 2);
@cols = qw(g r y);
$i=$j=0;
$s =~ s!($nums[$i++])!s$cols[$j++]$1s!g;
print "Want: '$t'\n";
print "Got:  '$s'\n";
print "i is now $i\n";
print "j is now $j\n";

The output of this program is unfortunately:

Want: 'sg1s 2 3 sr1s 2 3 1 sy2s 3'
Got:  'sg1s 2 3 sr1s 2 3 sy1s 2 3'
i is now 1
j is now 3

Perl ended up incorrectly coloring the third ‘1′ yellow, instead of the
third ‘2′, because in the substitution regular expression, the left
(matching) side was evaluated/compiled only once, while the right
(replacement) side was evaluated/interpolated three times (as desired).

I know that there are ways to force the left side of the RE to compile only
once (/o modifier, qr// operator), and there are ways to force eval in the
right side (/e and /ee modifiers — although in this case, standard
interpolation was sufficient), but is there any way I can force the *left* side
to compile *multiple* times? (Even within the same /g substitution?) I tried
a few constructs using the \G (start matching from previous position)
zero-width assertion, but only managed to get myself into infinite loops.

I'd appreciate any help anyone can offer -- including "What an idiot, the
RIGHT way to do that is completely different! (And here it is...)"

thx for thinking for me!

r
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