Ignore any non-aphanumeric characters within matched text

Bo wrote:
> Yes, i would like those values of B to also match. B
could have any
> number of non-aphanumeric characters present in any
location.

Assume 'A' can contain only alpha-numeric, and no
metacharacter within
'A'.

so for an 'A' like '12345', you actually want a pattern
like:

 1W*2W*3W*4W*5

(Just for easy description, I used w instead of
[A-Za-z0-9], and W
instead of [^A-Za-z0-9] to specify alphanumerics and
non-alphanumerics...)

so that we can get:

match:   1###2---34-5---
nonmatch: 1##2*2--345

Thus, given an 'A', use the following replacement:

for (non-)word:
Pattern  :   (?<=w)(?=w)
Replace:  \W*

for (non-)alphanumeric:
Pattern:     (?<=[A-Za-z0-9])(?=[A-Za-z0-9])
Replace:    [^A-Za-z0-9]*

for example, in Perl, let

   $A = '12345';
   $B = '1(945)123-4567' ;
   ($A_ptn = $A) =~ s/(?<=w)(?=w)/\W*/g;
   print "Matchn" if $B =~ /$A_ptn/;

then $A_ptn is defined as:

   1W*2W*3W*4W*5

and $B = '1(945)123-4567' should be able to match the above
pattern..
it's quite similar if you are using Ruby.. Below is a short
Perl test
code(under Linux):

perl -wle '
    my $A = "12345";
    (my $A_ptn = $A) =~ s/(?<=w)(?=w)/\W*/g;
    my B = qw/
        1(234)566-6666
        ***1-2-34-5-****
        1***234^^56666
        1+++2---34-5---
        1++2*2--345
        12345
    /;
    print "Matched: $_" for grep {/$A_ptn/} B;
'
___result_____________
Matched: 1(234)566-6666
Matched: ***1-2-34-5-****
Matched: 1***234^^56666
Matched: 1+++2---34-5---
Matched: 12345
_____________

Good luck,
Xicheng


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