Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest (Score 5, Insightful)

s!(?:^|\w*/|\.\./|\./)[^\s,@;:]*(? Interesting? Thats a one line regexp which does something which appears to be very very simple to do, but actually isnt.

That looks really simple? Sorry but it doesn't look to me. Perl may be a a very very powerful language, but that alone does not make it a language of choice.

Well that is a regular expression, not Perl. It's a different language, and is the standard way of handling strings in most programming languages. To be honest, I first learned about them in a formal language class in college, years before I picked up Perl.

If you don't like regular expressions, that's your choice, but it really has nothing to do with Perl, and you should try to understand them, as they are very useful, even outside programming.