Regex help

[ht]

does anyone know a regex pattern that can match,
text within five words of text

e.g.
text hello goodbye today yesterday find text bye him her wait text

match: text bye him her wait text

I thought it would be something like text(?:[\w]*){1,5}text but that doesn't work.

I would also like to be able to change the amount of within words
Help anyone ?

thanks
TH

[Jim Gibson]

In article <15**************************@posting.google.com >, ht
<to***@perfectinfo.com> wrote:

does anyone know a regex pattern that can match,
text within five words of text
It is not clear what you mean here.

e.g.
text hello goodbye today yesterday find text bye him her wait text

match: text bye him her wait text

I thought it would be something like text(?:[\w]*){1,5}text but that doesn't
work.
\w is the equivalent of a character, so it is not necessary to put it
within '[]' brackets. You probably want "one or more" characters
instead of "zero or more", so use '+' instead of '*'. Lastly, you need
to match the whitespace characters between the words:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $string =
"text hello goodbye today yesterday find text bye him her wait text";

if( $string =~ /text\s+(?:\w+\s+){1,5}text/ ) {
print "match\n";
}else{
print "no match\n";
}

prints "match".

I would also like to be able to change the amount of within words
I am afraid I don't know what you mean here, either.
Help anyone ?
It is best to post a complete, short-as-possible program that shows the
problem you are encountering, what the program does, and what you think
it should be doing instead.

thanks
TH

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