SPUG: regular expression question

Charles Connolly cconnoll at u.washington.edu
Mon Nov 14 22:29:34 PST 2005


Hi,
     I'm having some trouble with a regular expression, and I thought I'd toss 
it out to the list, especially since it seems quiet here lately. 
     I'd like to process a file line by line, capturing the everything from the 
start of the line to a hash mark (#), which would indicate a comment. Here are 
some things I tried: 

my $line =~ /^(.*)\#?/; # this takes the entire line, as expected. 

my $line =~ /^(.*?)\#?/; # this works if there is a comment, but not if there 
isn't. If there isn't a comment it captures the shortest match, which is 
nothing.

All suggestions are welcomed.

Thanks,

Chuck



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