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in reply to Re: Match all Non-0 and Letters
in thread Match all Non-0 and Letters

All, thank you very much for the help. My apologies with the confusing post as I typed this out before bed last night in desperation. The word extraction happens farther up in the subroutine than I've shown, but by the time it gets to this point, it will always be 8 continuous digits (or letters if there's corruption) not separated by whitespace.

I realize that using the $D1 and $D2 variables makes the regex much more difficult than it needed to be, but I created those to try and figure out where the regex was failing at. When I tried my initial regex it looked something like this

if ($Disc =~ /[1-9a-zA-Z]{7}\D/)

However, this still did not perform the functions that I was wanting. I did try something similar to if ($Disc !~ /0{7}\d/) but I think I may have used a D by mistake. I just tried if ($Disc !~ /(0{7})(\d$)/) and the regex worked great!

Thank you all for the quick replies and showing the correct syntax for what I'm trying to do. As I mentioned before, I'm relatively new to Perl, so I still have quite a ways to go, especially with the regex syntax.

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Re^3: Match all Non-0 and Letters
by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Jun 25, 2017 at 00:16 UTC
    The word ... will always be 8 continuous digits (or letters if there's corruption) not separated by whitespace.
    ...
    I just tried if ($Disc !~ /(0{7})(\d$)/) and the regex worked great!

    Note that if  $Disc can ever possibly be longer than eight characters (update: with extra characters at the beginning), that regex will fail: 

    c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $Disc = 'foo00000008';
 ;;
 if ($Disc !~ /(0{7})(\d$)/) {
   print qq{'$Disc' is bad};
   }
 else {
   print qq{'$Disc' is OK!};
   }
"
'foo00000008' is OK!

    [download]
    If the string can only possibly be exactly eight characters, the  $ end-of-string anchor is redundant. OTOH, I would tend to play it safe and include both start-of-string  ^ and end-of-string anchors: it can't hurt, and may save you someday when one of your upstream assumptions fails you.

    The other thing I notice about the  /(0{7})(\d$)/ regex is that  (0{7}) captures a substring that can't possibly be anything other than '0000000', so why bother? (I assume you have some reason for capturing the trailing digit.)

    So what I might end up with would be something like  m{ \A 0{7} (\d) \z }xms (in a testing matrix): 

    c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"for my $Disc (qw(
   00000000 00000001 00000002 00000003 00000004
   00000005 00000006 00000007 00000008 00000009
   0 00 000 0000 00000 000000 0000000 000000000
   FFFFFFFF ffffffff 6C163512
   x00000000  00000000x  x00000000x
   x0000000   0000000x   x0000000x
   x000000000 000000000x x000000000x
   ), '') {
   ;;
   my $proper_word =
   my ($righmost_digit) = $Disc =~ m{ \A 0{7} (\d) \z }xms;
   ;;
   if ($proper_word) {
     print qq{'$Disc' ok, rightmost digit '$righmost_digit'};
     }
   else {
     print qq{'$Disc' is bad};
     }
   }
"
'00000000' ok, rightmost digit '0'
'00000001' ok, rightmost digit '1'
'00000002' ok, rightmost digit '2'
'00000003' ok, rightmost digit '3'
'00000004' ok, rightmost digit '4'
'00000005' ok, rightmost digit '5'
'00000006' ok, rightmost digit '6'
'00000007' ok, rightmost digit '7'
'00000008' ok, rightmost digit '8'
'00000009' ok, rightmost digit '9'
'0' is bad
'00' is bad
'000' is bad
'0000' is bad
'00000' is bad
'000000' is bad
'0000000' is bad
'000000000' is bad
'FFFFFFFF' is bad
'ffffffff' is bad
'6C163512' is bad
'x00000000' is bad
'00000000x' is bad
'x00000000x' is bad
'x0000000' is bad
'0000000x' is bad
'x0000000x' is bad
'x000000000' is bad
'000000000x' is bad
'x000000000x' is bad
'' is bad

    [download]
    (See also Test::More for more thorough testing possibilities.)

    Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

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