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Re: whole word recipe

2002-05-27 19:11:49
 Thank you for your response. 

To take things apart a bit.

First I see you start with () this is so that there is no confusion with \  
starting the line. Thats good syntax.

The (  ) parenthesis around the bit in the middle I suppose is for the same 
thing. Keep it all together 
so there is no confusion.

The ? I find a bit confusing. You know even when I read regular expression 
descriptions over and over 
it seems even more cryptic.

The man page says:

Match the character before or after a word. They are merely a shorthand for 
`[^a-zA-Z0-9_]', but can also match newlines. Since they match actual 
characters, they are only suitable to delimit words, not to delimit inter-word 
space. 

I guess one thing I dont understand even though I read it in black and white is:

Since they match actual characters, they are only suitable to delimit words, 
not to delimit inter-word space. 

Im confused what the difference between a space and a inter-word space is, they 
sound the same to me.

Can you flesh this out a little for me.

Thank you.
--

On Mon, 27 May 2002 19:30:13  
 Martin McCarthy wrote:
I have the following recipe where one line doesnt
seem to work.
...
        :0
        * ^Subject:.*WEIGHT
             {
             :0 B:
->prolem line?       * .*\<HUNZA\>.*\<BREAD\>
             IN-Bread
             }

This catches a lot of people.  If you check closely through the
procmailrc man page you'll see that \< and \> *don't* match a word
boundary but *do* match non-word characters.  So \>.*\< will need to
match at least 2 characters!.  You can replace that condition line with
something like:

  * ()\<HUNZA\>(.*\<)?BREAD\>

As is hopefully clear, the regular expression \>(.*\<)? will match
against one non-word character followed, optionally, by (any number of
characters which ends with a non-word character).

Hope that helps,
Martin
-- 
Martin McCarthy                 /</    http://procmail.non-prophet.org
   `Procmail Companion'        \>\
    Addison Wesley             /</                  PGP key available
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