Listing all regexs possibilities

[bugmenot2]

I have some regex lists, and I need to print all possibilities from them.

Like that:

print abac[ao]

that would print:

abaca
abaco

Can this be possible?

[eWish]

I would say yes. What have you tried?

--Kevin

[bugmenot2]

Yeah, but it didn't work:

$ perl -e 'print "abac[ao]\n"'
abac[ao]

[eWish]

If you want to do 'a' or 'o' then you would need abc[a|o].

my @array = qw(abca abcd abco abca abco abci abcf abca);
 
foreach (grep/abc[a|o]/, @array) {
    print $_, "\n";
}

--Kevin

[bugmenot2]

But I don't want to supply words...I'm looking for something like this:

print "abc[a|o]";

or

print "test?[a-z]"

and go on...

there is a way to do that?

[eWish]

I used a list as an example. Can you show me 10 lines of expected output, because I am having trouble understanding what you are wanting to do I guess. Also, where is your data from from?

Edit: Are you looking for something like this:

print join("\n", ('testa ..testz'));

Output:

testa
testb
testc
testd
and so on to testz

--Kevin

[Ganon11]

The OP has a list of regular expressions, and wants to be able to print all possible patterns the regex will match. So if he had a simple one like /\d/, it would print each string that the regex would match - namely, 0, 1, 2, etc. etc.

[bugmenot2]

Ganon11: that's exacly what I'm trying to do.

[eWish]

I have never done it, but I am sure that it is possible.

--Kevin

[Ganon11]

You can probably do it with a recursive function. Imagine this:

You are building a word step by step when you encounter a special character - be it a \d, or a [a-z], or whatever. You then loop over the possible matches, calling the function with a partial string (your word so far, plus the character your loop is on) and the pattern.

When there are no more special cases, you print out the word and return, and let recursion work its magic.

Note: as soon as you have a modifier like + or *, you will have an infinite number of possibilities (e.g. /\d+/ will match 1, 11, 111, 1111, ..., 11111111111111111...., etc. etc. So you need to make sure that doesn't happen.

[KevinADC]

I have some regex lists, and I need to print all possibilities from them.

Like that:

print abac[ao]

that would print:

abaca
abaco

Can this be possible?

Possible? Yes. Easy and automatic? No. Perl will not expand your regexp character class automatically and print all possible permutations, you will pretty much have to hard code that yourself.

[bugmenot2]

It's ok guys, I was hoping for a easy solution. It's better forget it. Thanks!