I have been racking my brains over this, but could not find help anywhere. It seems that doing wacky stuff in Perl out of desperation actually pays off!
I wanted to search a string using this regexp without knowing how many matches I would find:
$string =~ /\(\d+):/g
This would match ’15′ and ’20′ in a string which looks like this :
$string = "(yeast:0.12313,((zebrafish:0.12312,fugu:0.84134)15:0.52313,
human:0.94424)20:0.93313);";
One can access the found values by using backreferences (in this case $1 and $2). But what if you do not know how many backreferences there are?
This piece of perl code will return the values of all the backreferences:
my @array;
while ($string =~ /\)(\d+):/g) {
push @array, $1;
}
@array will contain the values of all the backreferences. Don’t ask me why this works…
My name is John van Dam and I am a Post-Doc at St. Radboud University Medical Center (NL). My research involves bioinformatics and comparative genomics on cilia and signal transduction pathways.