Question

My perl is getting rusty. It only prints “matched=” but $1 is blank!?!

EDIT 1: WHo the h#$! downvoted this? There are no wrong questions. If you dont like it, move on to next one!

$crazy="abcd\r\nallo\nXYZ\n\n\nQQQ";
if ($crazy =~ m/([.\n\r]+)/gsi) {
    print "matched=", $1, "\n";
} else {
    print "not matched!\n";
} 

EDIT 2: This is the code fragment with updated regex, works great!

$crazy="abcd\r\nallo\nXYZ\n\n\nQQQ";
if ($crazy =~ m/([\s\S]+)/gsi) {
    print "matched=", $1, "\n";
} else {
    print "not matched!\n";
} 

EDIT 3: Haha, i see perl police strikes yet again!!!

Answer 1

I don’t know if this is your exact problem, but inside square brackets, '.' is just looking for a period. I didn’t see a period in the input, so I wondered which you meant.

Aside from the period, the rest of the character class is looking for consecutive whitespace. And as you didn’t use the multiline switch, you’ve got newlines being counted as whitespace (and any character), but no indication to scan beyond the first record separator. But because of the way that you print it out, it also gives some indication that you meant more than the literal period, as mentioned above.