searching/grepping for words "near" each other

[Kevin D. Clark]

> That will work, but only if the search terms appear in document in the
> same order as they appear in the query.  (This appears to be the case
> with the hipdig solution as well.  Correct me if I'm wrong, of
> course.)  The search terms I'm looking for could appear in the target
> document in any order.  Perhaps I could have made that clearer.  Okay,
> I *could* have made that clearer.

Tricky but doable.

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  
  # author: kevin d. clark
  
  use warnings;
  use strict;
  
  my %seen;
  my $r;
  
  undef $/;
  
  while (defined($_=<>)) {
  
    undef $^N;
  
    print "Filename: $ARGV\n$&\n" if (/
                      
                ((??{
                    $r = "";
                    $seen{$^N}++ if (defined($^N));
  
                    $r .= "weapons|" if (!defined($seen{"weapons"}));
                    $r .= "mass|" if (!defined($seen{"mass"}));
                    $r .= "distraction" if (!defined($seen{"distraction"}));
                    $r;
                }))
  
                .{0,100}?     # 0-100 characters of any random cruft
  
                ((??{
                    $r = "";
                    $seen{$^N}++ if (defined($^N));
  
                    $r .= "weapons|" if (!defined($seen{"weapons"}));
                    $r .= "mass|" if (!defined($seen{"mass"}));
                    $r .= "distraction" if (!defined($seen{"distraction"}));
                    $r;
                }))
  
                .{0,100}?     # 0-100 characters of any random cruft
  
                ((??{
                    $r = "";
                    $seen{$^N}++ if (defined($^N));
  
                    $r .= "weapons|" if (!defined($seen{"weapons"}));
                    $r .= "mass|" if (!defined($seen{"mass"}));
                    $r .= "distraction" if (!defined($seen{"distraction"}));
                    $r;
                }))
            /xs)
  }

  __END__

I could generalize this and all, but I am busy.  Basically, the gist
of this code is that it generates the regexp to match while the regexp
engine is doing the matching.

Just another Perl hacker,

--kevin
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