[ale] Single out a alarm with regex

[Christopher Fowler]

On Thu, 2006-10-05 at 09:58 -0400, Alex LeDonne wrote:
> Can anything come after the type? Or, more particularly, can anything
> come after the type if the type is "MAINT INDICATION" ? 

Yes.  It can be a timestamp or more.

> Finally, is
> there guaranteed to be at least one whitespace character preceding the
> type? 

Yes

> This is critical if you want the zero-width assertion to work...
> if you have .* immediately before a zero-width negative lookahead,
> when the negative assertion blocks the match, the engine will
> backtrack and .* will consume the next character, the negative no
> longer blocks, and the pattern matches. 

I'm sorry I showed Perl code and everyone is assuming I'm writing the
code in perl.  I'm only using perl to test the regex.  This regex will
go in a list of 100 other regexs and a C program that is using the gnu
regex library will be doing the searches.  It is not possible to grab
anything than later look for 'MAINT INDICATION' like this:

        if (/^DCH:\s+\d+\s+(\w+).*$/) {
                if ($1 ne 'MAINT') {
                        foo;
                }
        }

Everything has to be done inside of the regex.