Alec Taylor
Would it be possible to abstract away the terms "apple" and "cheese" to just equal anything with that pattern?
So like this:
s1=name1-> consecutive-number s2= consecutive-number->name2 s3=name1->consecutive-number s4=consecutive-number->name2
Just what pattern do you mean, though? You've used "name" and "string1". Is there a character class or other short regexp that would match what you mean by "name" below? And do you already have the 4 strings, or are you scanning a continuous piece of text? If the latter, you're suddenly in the realm of wanting a state machine (because if s4 fails to match, then might have to consider s3 the new s1 and s4 the new s2...) Is "consecutive" only within the 4 strings, or is it actually cumulative from some other value? (This is a big part of what makes this difficult to do with boost or any other C/C++-based RE engine. Perl allows one to actually do evaluation within the search string, so you really could match this all with a single RE there -- but it'd be ugly, and I don't really know how efficient it would be.) Curious, T.