Re: Less greedy pattern match

On Thursday 17 April 2008 21:33, Ed Morton wrote:

> Yeah, that is a bit simpler than the awk equivalent:
> 
> $ cat file
> <tag><section><t1>foo</t1><t2>blah</t2><t1>bar</t1></section>
> <section><t1>baz</t1><t2>blah</t2><t1>baz</t1></section></tag>
> 
> $ awk
'{o="</t1>";n=SUBSEP;gsub(o,n);gsub("<t1>[^"n"]*"n,"");gsub(n,o)}1'
> file <tag><section><t2>blah</t2></section>
> <section><t2>blah</t2></section></tag>

Yes, and that needs yet another bit of work if we have eg

<t1>foo
bar</t1>

or even

<t1>foo<subt1>blahblah
</subt1></t1>

which in perl can be folded with the regular case (although this isn't
strictly related to the matter of less-greediness).

> or something else to chop up and reassemble the record. It is a pity
there
> isn't a "not" operator for RE elements other than characters within
[...].

Agreed.

-- 
All the commands are tested with bash and GNU tools, so they may use
nonstandard features. I try to mention when something is nonstandard (if
I'm aware of that), but I may miss something. Corrections are welcome.