perl regex help request... .

[Andrew Pantyukhin]

On 3/23/06, Gary Kline <kline at tao.thought.org> wrote:
>
>         Guys,
>
>         perlmonks was helpful in explaining that "[[](\d+)[]]" is
>         what is required to match [NN].   So that will catch the
>         footnote numbers.  I had thought that I would have to do the
>         <A NAME="NN"> NN xyz </A> anchor by hand.   Maybe not, if
>         somebody can clue me in on the perl regex for matching
>
>         "NN plus any/every character following until \n"
>
>         I can't find my regex book, and am not exactly clear if this
>         will work, but if I go back over my files and insert braces
>         around each note (at the page bottom) like:
>
>         {14, DEWEY AND TUFTS, *Ethics*, pp 345-7, &sect; 4 }
>
>         would this:
>
>         s/{(\d+)}(.+)/
>
>         capture the "14" plus  the rest on the bracketed line?  The
>         HTML would be (methinks):
>
>         <A NAME="14">14, DEWEY AND TUFTS, *Ethics*, pp 345-7, &sect; 4 </A>
>
>         with the $1 capturing the 14 and $2 capturing the rest?
>
>         The entire s//g expr would be::
>
>         s/{(\d+)}(.+)/<A NAME="$1> $1 $2 </A>
>
>         If this is right, I'll be very pleased with myself; else I'm
>         hoping that somebody can clue me in.

{(\d+)} matches {1} or {123} or {89437863896}, but does not
match when there's a non-digit (even a whitespace) inside the
brackets.

If you know that there are no curly braces inside the curly braces
you could use just /{(\d+)(.*?)}/

If you're not sure, /{(\d+)(.*)}/ without the /s switch should also work
as . will not match a newline.