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in reply to On zero-width negative lookahead assertions

The following works if you break it into two expressions, but I can't see why yours doesn't match. 

  perl -ne '/^root:\s*/ and $_ !~ /admin\@somewhere\.here/ and print' 
+alias

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Update: Moving it around also works: 
  perl -ne '/^root:(?!\s*admin\@somewhere\.here)/ and print' alias

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pbeckingham - typist, perishable vertebrate.

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Re^2: On zero-width negative lookahead assertions
by bronto (Priest) on Sep 10, 2004 at 14:25 UTC
    perl -ne '/^root:\s*/ and $_ !~ /admin\@somewhere\.here/ and print' alias

    That's ok, but I want to understand that blah-blah-look-ahead thing

    perl -ne '/^root:(?!\s*admin\@somewhere\.here)/ and print' alias

    This works! But I can't understand why it doesn't work if you put the \s* outside the parens, nor I can understand why it stops working if I put the \s*$ at the end of the regex :-(

    Thanks a lot

    Ciao!
    --bronto

    In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
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      > But I can't understand why it doesn't work if you put the \s* outside the parens, nor I can understand why it stops working if I put the \s*$ at the end of the regex :-(

      That is because if you have the string 

      root: admin@somewhere.here
11111233333333333333333333

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      and the RE 

      /^root:\s*(?!\s*admin\@somewhere\.here)/
 ABBBBBCCC

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      then the part A in the RE matches the beginning of the string, part BBBBB matches 11111 ("root:") and CCC matches an empty string (not a space, a string with zero chars in it). After this empty string follows a space, and the space is not the beginning of "admin@somewhere.here", because it is the beginning of " admin@somewhere.here".

      I hope things are getting clearer for you :-)

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