Telling regex search to only start searching at a certain index - regex

Question

Normally, a regex search will start searching for matches from the beginning of the string I provide. In this particular case, I'm working with a very large string (up to several megabytes), and I'd like to run successive regex searches on that string, but beginning at specific indices.
Now, I'm aware that I could use the substr function to simply throw away the part at the beginning I want to exclude from the search, but I'm afraid this is not very efficient, since I'll be doing it several thousand times.
The specific purpose I want to use this for is to jump from word to word in a very large text, skipping whitespace (regardless of whether it's simple space, tabs, newlines, etc). I know that I could just use the split function to split the text into words by passing \s+ as the delimiter, but that would make things for more complicated for me later on, as there a various other possible word delimiters such as quotes (ok, I'm using the term 'word' a bit generously here), so it would be easier for me if I could just hop from word to word using successive regex searches on the same string, always specifying the next index at which to start looking as I go. Is this doable in Perl?

Answer 1

So you want to match against the words of a body of text.
(The examples find words that contain i.)
You think having the starting positions of the words would help, but it isn't useful. The following illustrates what it might look like to obtain the positions and use them:
my #positions;
while ($text =~ /\w+/g) {
push #positions, $-[0];
}
my #matches;
for my $pos (#positions) {
pos($text) = $pos;
push #matches $1 if $text =~ /\G(\w*i\w*)/g;
}
If would far simpler not to use the starting positions at all. Aside from being far simpler, we also remove the need for two different regex patterns to agree as to what constitute a word. The result is the following:
my #matches;
while ($text =~ /\b(\w*i\w*)/g) {
push #matches $1;
}
or
my #matches = $text =~ /\b(\w*i\w*)/g;
A far better idea, however, is to extra the words themselves in advance. This approach allows for simpler patterns and more advanced definitions of "word"[1].
my #matches;
while ($text =~ /(\w+)/g) {
my $word = $1;
push #matches, $word if $word =~ /i/;
}
or
my #matches = grep { /i/ } $text =~ /\w+/g;
For example, a proper tokenizer could be used.

Answer 2

In the absence of more information, I can only suggest the pos function
When doing a global regex search, the engine saves the position where the previous match ended so that it knows where to start searching for the next iteration. The pos function gives access to that value and allows it to be set explicitly, so that a subsequent m//g will start looking at the specified position instead of at the start of the string
This program gives an example. The string is searched for the first non-space character after each of a list of offsets, and displays the character found, if any
Note that the global match must be done in scalar context, which is applied by if here, so that only the next match will be reported. Otherwise the global search will just run on to the end of the file and leave information about only the very last match
use strict;
use warnings 'all';
use feature 'say';
my $str = 'a b c d e f g h i j k l m n';
# 0123456789012345678901234567890123456789
# 1 2 3
for ( 4, 31, 16, 22 ) {
pos($str) = $_;
say $1 if $str =~ /(\S)/g;
}
output
c
l
g
i