Your substitution regex is failing
because you are trying to match the semicolon at the end of
the previous line. But that is not part of the quoted value
being entered into $line.
You also have a bit more escaping than necessary. Try this:
$line =~ s/^\$mypic\[0] = "(\w{3})"$/$1/g;
FWIW #1: This is a good example of the problem with using
a regex in this way. You may have been thinking that
your regex was doing something magically strange to spit
back the whole line. In fact it simply failed. So when
you do this for the purpose of retreiving a value
you almost always want to do something like:
my $newval;
if ($line =~ /^\$mypic\[0] = "(\w{3})"$/) {
$newval = $1;
}
else {
# handle failure to get essential value
}
If that looks like too much code and you remember
that a regex with parentheses returns those saved values
when it is in a list context, you can do this:
my $newval;
unless ( ($newval) = $line =~ /(\w{3})"$/ ) {
# handle failure to get essential value
}
For comment on this shorter regex, read on...
FWIW #2: Your question may be more of an
exercise than a practical
application. But to the extent that this is for some real
and specific need, I tend to keep my regexen to the
minimum to do the job and try not to get into the trap of
matching the entire data string if that is not
needed for filtering purposes.
In this
case something along the lines of: /(\w{3})"$/
seems to do what you need (within the bounds of this
limited example).
There
are always anomalies that crop up in the data and the more
I try to match everything, the more likely it is that
the regex could fail for unforeseen reasons.
The notable exception to this habit is when the task is
security or access related. Then I get very picky about
what I let through.
This may not apply to your present purpose, but it is
something that struck me immediately about your
longer regex.
HTH,
David | 