Getting the right order with Regular Expressions

[RedRobotHero]

I'm making a CGI script that will convert another file format into HTML with style tags.

In this format, (Xtags) there's two types of tags I want to use, one of the format

<@[a-zA-Z]+>

and one of the format

@[a-zA-Z]+:

.

I want to deal with these codes in the order in which they appear from left to right. But I have to use different code for the two cases.

The approach I've thought to use is this:

while ((/<@[a-zA-Z]+>/)&&($c1=1)||
       (/@[a-zA-Z]+:/)&&($c2=1)) {

 if ($c1==1) {
    deal with the tag and replace it with new tag.
  };

 if ($c2==1) {
    deal with the other tag and replace it with new tag.
  };

 $c1=0;
 $c2=0;
}

Is this really the best approach? Or is there a better way for me to deal with this?

 

[Coderifous]

If it works...

--jim

 

[RedRobotHero]

Well, that's the thing. I tried it, and I did something wrong, because it doesn't work. And before I go to the trouble of debugging it as it stands, I wanted to know if there is a tried-and-tested method that I should be using instead.

 

[arcnon]

read in the file to a array

foreach $line (@array){
$line=~s/<[a-z] +>//gi;
$line=~s/<[a-z] +\/>//gi;
}

I am not quite sure how you identifing the tags
but this is the perl substitution method the
g mean global
i case insensative

hope this helps

 

[RedRobotHero]

If I just read the lines in order, there could still be more than one tag per line. And I need to know the order, because what I replace a tag with depends on what tag preceded it.

 

[Coderifous]

So you are trying to match tags, and you need to keep track of the preceding tag, maybe this:

while ( m/<?           #Angle bracket, or not
          @[a-zA-Z]+   #common between your two regexes
          (>|:)        #other bracket, or semicolon
         /gx           #the g will make give us one
                       #match per loop, the match is
                       #avaiable via the $& variable. 
      ){

    $matched_tag = $&;
    $tag_type    = ($1 eq '>') ? &quot;type one&quot; : &quot;type two&quot;;

    if($last_tag eq $matched_tag){
      .. do stuff ..
    }
    else{
      .. do something else ..
    }

    $last_tag    = $matched_tag;

}

Hope this helps...

--jim