Question

I’m trying to get a regex that matches: (It should not match any other string)

Word1 or Word2 or Word3 or Wordn

Capturing the words between before or after an “or”

1: Word1
2: Word2
3: Word3
n: Wordn

I’ve tried modifying a csv regex:

(?:^|,)(\"(?:[^\"]+|\"\")*\"|[^,]*)

to

(?:^|(?:or)((?:[^(?:or)]+)*|[^(?:or)]*)

But that does not give me what I want.

I’m sure I’m missing something, but I’ve been banging my head for hours.

Answer 1

How about:

my $string = "  foo or    bar or  foobar ";
if ( $string =~ m|^\s*[^\s]+(\s+or\s+[^\s]+)+\s*$| ) {
    my $tmp = "$string";
    $tmp =~ s|^\s+||;
    $tmp =~ s|\s+$||;
    my @words = split( /\s+or\s+/, $tmp );
    printf( "Found %d words:\n", scalar( @words ) );
    foreach my $word ( @words ) {
        print( "\t'$word'\n" );
    }
} else {
    print( "No match\n" );
}

The above will output:

Found 3 words:
    'foo'
    'bar'
    'foobar'