Re: Less greedy pattern match

"Ed Morton" <morton@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:48057145.9090408@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
> On 4/15/2008 9:59 PM, Prateek wrote:
>> Hi,
>> This question is regarding the less greedy regular expression pattern
>> match. As you know, Perl provides less greedy pattern match parameter
>> in the form of repetition?
>>
>> But does gawk provide anything similar?
>>
>> The sample I was trying was:
>>
>> echo ccccccd | gawk '{ print match ($0,c*?d)
>>
>> I was expecting value 6 as output
>
> why?
>
>> but was always getting value 1.
>>
>> (The above is only an example; my patterns are more complex and was
>> trying to find less greedy operators)
>
> There's no "less greedy" operator (to be honest, I'm not sure what that 
> really
> means or why it'd be more useful than a different RE), but if you post 
> some
> sample input and expected output we can probably help get what you want 
> using
> the existing functionality.
>
> Ed.
>
>
match returns the index of start of match within the string not number of 
occurrences .
For less greedy expressions you can use interval expressions like c{1}. 
If 
you are looking for number of consecutive occurrences change your c*?d to
c* 
and print RLENGTH. If you are looking for occurrences that are 
non-consecutive use a gsub in combination with an interval expression.

Rajan