This rather long winded Perl subroutine returns an array of numbers expanded from a list such as 34,35,36,42-56,98-150. There are plenty of other ways to do this (eval comes to mind).
sub expand { my $range = shift; my @result; $range =~ s/[^\d\-\,]//gs; #remove extraneous characters my @items = split(/,/,$range); foreach (@items){ m/^\d+$/ and push(@result,$_) and next; my ($start,$finish) = split /-/; push(@result,($start .. $finish)) if $start < $finish; } return @result; }
