how do I check for this rule

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

All occurances of XXX should be followed by 0 or more blank spaces, 1 or more newline, and then YYY

Comment on how do I check for this rule

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Re: how do I check for this rule by moxliukas (Curate) on Nov 19, 2003 at 10:14 UTC
`/XXX\s\n+YYY/sg;` UPDATE:* I have misread the question first and thought that the monk wanted to find all occurances rather than validate them. Please read the answer that Roger provided below. That's what English being not the first language does for you -- my mistake.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: how do I check for this rule by Roger (Parson) on Nov 19, 2003 at 10:35 UTC
Hang on, not so fast. ;-) Your regular expression will only find matching occurances of XXX ... YYY, NOT to validate all occurances. To validate a sequence, you will have to make sure there is no mismatches of XXX, and hence require a bit more work. `use strict; my $data; { local $/; $data = <DATA>; } # number of times didn't match XXX ... YYY # is total number of XXX minus the XXX ... YYY # pattern appears. my $non_match = $#{[$data =~ /(XXX)/gs]} - $#{[$data =~ /(XXX\s*\n+YYY)/gs]}; print !$non_match ? "All sequences of XXX - YYY are ok\n" : "$non_match bad sequences found\n"; __DATA__ XXX YYY XXX ZZZ XXXYYY` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: how do I check for this rule by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Nov 19, 2003 at 10:46 UTC
Or just: `$str !~ /XXX(?!\s*\n+YYY)/;` [download] Abigail	[reply] [d/l]