So, I thought it would be fun to have a regex that checks for a valid State Postal Code. There are 57 codes for the US, so I wanted to write a program to produce the regex. Here's the program:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my @states = qw[
AL AK AS AZ CA CO CT DE DC FM
FL GA GU HI ID IL IN IA KS KY
LA ME MH MD MA MN MS MO MT NE
NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND MP OH OK
OR PW PA PR RI SC SD TN TX UT
VT VI VA WA WV WI WY
];
my %sets = ();
my @sets = ();
foreach ( @states ) {
my ($first, $last) = split //;
push @{$sets{$first}}, $last
unless exists $sets{$last} && grep { $first eq $_ } @{$sets{$last}};
}
foreach ( keys %sets ) {
push @sets, sprintf '%s[%s]', $_, join( '', @{$sets{$_}} );
}
my $regex = join '|', map "\n\t$_", @sets;
print "qr/(${regex}\n)/x\n";
And the output:
qr/(
A[LKSZ]|
C[AOT]|
D[EC]|
F[ML]|
G[AU]|
H[I]|
I[DLNA]|
K[SY]|
M[EHDANSOTP]|
N[EVHJYCD]|
O[HKR]|
P[WAR]|
R[I]|
S[CD]|
T[NX]|
U[T]|
V[TIA]|
W[AVIY]
)/x
Of course this is a nearly unmaintainable piece of junk, but it was really fun to build.
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