I am, of course, dealing with some exceptions in a body of text. The text has some irregularities, but could be parsed correctly if only I am able to impose a strict ordering of match priority. It isn't an issue of quotes, nor is nesting involved; it's actually an issue of some potential "false positives" that must be initially skipped in favor of a more favorable match unless that more favorable match cannot be found--in which case the "false positive" might be the correct match. Does this make sense?

I suspect it's likely you won't be able to do this with a simple regex. It sounds to me like you might want to start looking at parsers, such as the classic Parse::RecDescent, the regex-based Regexp::Grammars, or the relatively new Marpa::R2. Or as a middle ground, have a look at how Text::Sentence, Lingua::Sentence, and Lingua::EN::Sentence work internally.

I sure was hoping someone would be able to suggest a regexp secret that I had not yet learned. I was hoping there would be some way of doing this. I may have to just pre-parse looking for the false positives, and exchange them temporarily for a marker of some sort before parsing a second time. I'm not even sure if that would work. I'll have to ponder that some more. I need to be able to reorder the sentences following a specific ruleset and in a specific order, by order of appearance in the sentence.

Sigh. Too bad regex can't do everything!

Blessings,

~Polyglot~

I'd say use Hippo's template of an SSCCE Re: Matching a string in a parenthesized block (regex help) to write some tests for
• what you want and
• what you don't want.
This would certainly be beneficial for you too.

Other than that, |-or conditions with swallowing can prioritize areas, like "quoted" ones. demo

  DB<132> $_ = 'phrase. "phrase1.phrase2" phrase. phrase'
0  'phrase. "phrase1.phrase2" phrase. phrase'

  DB<133> split /(".*?"|\.)/
0  'phrase'
1  '.'
2  ' '
3  '"phrase1.phrase2"'
4  ' phrase'
5  '.'
6  ' phrase'

  DB<134>
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