Re: [Expectperl-discuss] regex pattern in expect method

[Roland G. <RGi...@a1...>]

> I'm doing some mulitline matching of an FTP prompt and I'm having
> trouble with a colon (:) in my regex.

No, you have troubles with backslashes...

> unless ( $pattern = $ftp->expect($timeout, '-re', 
  "550 $list/archive/latest/\*:", "226 Transfer complete.\r\nftp> " )){

Well, if I would be a perl parser, I would think: "Hmm, a string in 
double quotes... OK, let's substitute... a '$' means a variable 
substitution... oh, there is a backslash, OK, let's quote the next 
character, but it isn't a special character, so I just remove the 
backslash".  And later, the regexp engine thinks: "Let's see, it 
matched everything so far, the next character should be a slash that 
can occur zero or any number of times... OK, there is one slash... next 
charcter shoudl be a colon... nope, there is an asterisk there, sorry, 
no match!".

I'd suggest you use qr() or double that backslash.

> I don't know where the ^M come from. No doubt, because I am
> running cygwin.

Maybe, but that could also be just missing CRLF->LF translation in the 
pty, which is system dependent, so yes, it's Cygwin.

> So, it apppears the colon is the problem. But wait! the
> after-match string still has the asterisk. I escaped the
> asterisk. Do I have to double-escape it?

Yes.

> -- 
> Greg Matheson                    The best jokes are 
> Chinmin College                  those you play on
>                                  yourself.
                                   ^ does the above one count? :-)

Hope this helps,

Roland
--
RGi...@cp...