Perl - Regex to extract only the comma-separated strings

perl, regex, split, www-mechanize

Solution

How about

[^,\s]+(,[^,\s]+)+

which will match one or more characters that are not a space or comma `[^,\s]+` followed by a comma and one or more characters that are not a space or comma, one or more times.

Further to comments

To match more than one sequence add the `g` modifier for global matching. The following splits each match `$&` on a `,` and pushes the results to `@matches`.

my $str = "sdfds cat_dog,horse,rabbit,chicken-pig then some more pig,duck,goose";
my @matches;

while ($str =~ /[^,\s]+(,[^,\s]+)+/g) {
    push(@matches, split(/,/, $&));
}   

print join("\n",@matches),"\n";

Problem

I have a question I am hoping someone could help with... I have a variable that contains the content from a webpage (scraped using WWW::Mechanize). The variable contains data such as these: ``` $var = "ewrfs sdfdsf cat_dog,horse,rabbit,chicken-pig" $var = "fdsf iiukui aawwe dffg elephant,MOUSE_RAT,spider,lion-tiger hdsfds jdlkf sdf" $var = "dsadp poids pewqwe ANTELOPE-GIRAFFE,frOG,fish,crab,kangaROO-KOALA sdfdsf hkew" ``` The only bits I am interested in from the above examples are: ``` @array = ("cat_dog","horse","rabbit","chicken-pig") @array = ("elephant","MOUSE_RAT","spider","lion-tiger") @array = ("ANTELOPE-GIRAFFE","frOG","fish","crab","kangaROO-KOALA") ``` The problem I am having: I am trying to extract only the comma-separated strings from the variables and then store these in an array for use later on. But what is the best way to make sure that I get the strings at the start (ie cat_dog) and end (ie chicken-pig) of the comma-separated list of animals as they are not prefixed/suffixed with a comma. Also, as the variables will contain webpage content, it is inevitable that there may also be instances where a commas is immediately succeeded by a space and then another word, as that is the correct method of using commas in paragraphs and sentences... For example: ``` Saturn was long thought to be the only ringed planet, however, this is now known not to be the case. ^ ^ | | note the spaces here and here ``` I am not interested in any cases where the comma is followed by a space (as shown above). I am only interested in cases where the comma DOES NOT have a space after it (ie cat_dog,horse,rabbit,chicken-pig) I have a tried a number of ways of doing this but cannot work out the best way to go about constructing the regular expression.

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