Question

I need to write regular expression that will parse strings like this:

Build-Depends: cdbs, debhelper (>=5), smthelse 

I want to extract package names (without version numbers and brackets).

I wrote something like this:

$line =~ /^Build-Depends:\s*(\S+)\s$/  

But it’s not exactly what I want.

Does someone know how to manage it?

P.S. I just want to get the list: “cdbs debhelper smthelse” as a result

Answer 1

This regex should do what you want: /\s(\S*)(?:\s\(.*?\))?(?:,|$)/g

Edit: You’d call it like this to loop through all the results:

while ($str =~ /\s(\S*)(?:\s\(.*?\))?(?:,|$)/g) {
    print "$1 is one of the packages.\n";
}