Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!ncar!tank!gargoyle!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: perl memory usage?
Message-ID: <1990Mar26.174959.20102@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 26 Mar 90 17:49:59 GMT
References: <1990Mar19.210743.15896@chinet.chi.il.us> <7480@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 26

In article <7515@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) writes:

>Well, actually, it turns out to be in the pattern match itself.  The reason
>the assignment enabled it is that pattern matching has to do extra junk
>if any of $&, $` or $' are mentioned elsewhere in the program. 

Perhaps a funky regexp would work better anyway, but I couldn't come
up with one.  I'm trying to merge items like:

identifer (used for key in associative array)
text (multi-line)
SUMMARY:
summary-text (multi-line)
STATUS:
text ...

If I find an updated item without the SUMMARY: entry, I want to grab the
summary-text from the old entry and insert it into the new above the
STATUS line.  My first attempt at pattern-matching with bracketed substrings
failed on these multi-line strings, so I switched to the $` and $' and
some tmp variables.  Is there a better way?  Note that I don't know which
(if either) entry contains the SUMMARY: or that an old entry even exists,
so the ability to test the success of the individual matches is handy.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us