From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <e8ce09f02b6789c5fa6114c5ffe4c260@terzarima.net>
From: Charles Forsyth <forsyth@terzarima.net>
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:54:50 +0100
To: 9fans@9fans.net
In-Reply-To: <a560a5d00810241504m442ba788u8f9a34218d18576f@mail.gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] non greedy regular expressions
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 27146b72-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

although it can be satisfying to do things in one instruction (one command)
i confess i often find it quicker to split up the problem in sam or acme:

1. delete everything not between delimiters
	,y/ABC([^C]|C[^B]|CB[^A]|\n)+CBA/d
2. delete the delimeters
	,x/ABC|CBA/d
3. look to decide if i missed a boundary case for my input

it would be easier if the delimiters weren't words, or your sections didn't span lines.
i didn't spend any time deciding whether there was a better way
to express the trailing word delimiter.  it's too late.

an example actually using the () [submatch] to extract and exchange two fields on each line:
	,x s/([^,]*),(.*)/\2,\1/