[OS X TeX] [OT] Need Perl Regex for...

[Alan Munn]

At 12:11 PM -0500 9/20/08, Herbert Schulz wrote:
>Howdy,
>
>Suppose I have a sentence like
>
>Here are some words <fnameA>.<fnameB>.<ext> and more text afterward.
>
>where <fnameA> and <fnameb> may have spaces/tabs in them and you may 
>assume <ext> has no spaces/tabs. Can one of you Perl experts out 
>there (I know you're there!) give me a Perl regex that would pick 
>out only the <fnameA>.<fnameB.<ext> part of the line. Can it be 
>generalized to include multiple <fname> sections separated by `.'

Unless the "Here are some words" part is some sort of fixed string 
that you could identify, I don't think there's any way to distinguish 
a word that is part of the "Here are some words" part from a word 
that is part of <fnameA>,  if <fnameA> is allowed to contain spaces.

I.e. if fnameA = My file.ext

how can you tell whether "My" in  "Here are some words My file.ext " 
belongs to the filename or not?

If spaces are prohibited, then the regex

(:?[\S]*?\.)+[\w]{3}

will pick out sequences of <fnameA>.<fnameB>.ext for arbitrary 
numbers of <fname> assuming ext is always 3 characters.  But I don't 
see a way around the spaces problem. (But I'm prepared to be amazed 
by someone else's answer!)

Alan