Perl regular expression broken after move to 11.23

[Chris Howard]

Old machine: HP-UX 11.11, Perl 5.8.5, possibly compiled it myself (I don't remember).

New machine: HP-UX 11.23, Perl 5.8.8 that came with the OS.

Regular expression is used in a short routine to put commas in a large dollar-value number:

$value =~ m/(-)??(\d{1,3})(\d\d\d)??(\d\d\d)??(\d\d\d)??(\d\d\d)??(\.\d\d)??$/;
$out = "${2},$3,$4,$5,$6${7}";
$out =~ s/,,+/,/g;
$out =~ s/,\././g;

The line starting with "$value" doesn't work correctly on the new machine. For example, input of 123465.78 gives output of "$123,"

Any ideas?

[Chris Howard]

Found a different RE on a website that will do the job. Don't know why this one doesn't work anymore.

Onward!

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Chris:

> input of 123465.78 gives output of "$123,"

Your code works for me on Perl v5.8.8 built for IA64.ARCHREV_0-thread-multi-LP64 on an 11.23 machine of mine.

There are much more reliable and robust ways to inject commas into integers or decimal numbers. Do you have what you want?

Regards!

...JRF...

[mvpel]

# this subroutine adds commas to a number
#
sub commify {
my $input = shift;
$input = reverse $input;
$input =~ s<(\d\d\d)(?=\d)(?!\d*\.)><$1,>g;
return reverse $input;
}

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again):

The algorithm posted by mypel handles integer and decimal input. Another variation works well for integers and decimal numbers with no more than three decimal places:

# perl -le '$i=shift;1 while ($i=~s/(\d)((\d\d\d)+\b)/$1,$2/g);print $i'

Regards!

...JRF...

[Chris Howard]

Yes, I did get a regular expression that works ok. I had to modify it a bit to handle negative numbers. But I am up and running.

Thanks everyone for the help.

Chris