Perl's @foo[3,7,1,-1] ?

[Hyuga]

On Jun 13, 6:22 pm, Brian Quinlan <br... at sweetapp.com> wrote:
> MRAB wrote:
> > Brian Quinlan wrote:
> >> kj wrote:
> >>> In <slrnh37t2p.63e.n... at irishsea.home.craig-wood.com> Nick Craig-Wood
> >>> <n... at craig-wood.com> writes:
>
> >>>> However I can't think of the last time I wanted to do this - array
> >>>> elements having individual purposes are usually a sign that you should
> >>>> be using a different data structure.
>
> >>> In the case I was working with, was a stand-in for the value returned
> >>> by some_match.groups().  The match comes from a standard regexp
> >>> defined elsewhere and that captures more groups than I need.  (This
> >>> regexp is applied to every line of a log file.)
>
> >>> kj
>
> >> The common idiom for this sort of thing is:
>
> >> _, _, _, val1, _, _, _, val2, ..., val3 = some_match.groups()
>
> > Alternatively:
>
> >     val1, val2, val3 = some_match.group(4, 8, something)
>
> Actually, now that I think about it, naming the groups seems like it
> would make this code a lot less brittle.

I was about to suggest that too, but it sounds like the OP has little
or no control, in this case, over the RE itself.  Another thing I
would suggest is using the (?:) syntax--it allows creating a syntactic
group that isn't returned in the list of match groups.