Matching the first letter in a string

Kiko has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi All, I'm trying to match the first leter in a string after i pull the string from a hash table. Here is a peace of the code.

#################
# PRINT RESULTS #
#################

while ($db->FetchRow()) {

    if(($row>=$min)&&($row<$max)) {

        my (%dbrow) = $db->DataHash();

        # Change the color of the row
        my $bgcolor="#E6E6D7";
        
        if ($color % 2 !=0) {
            $bgcolor = "#DDDDDD";
        }
        
        my $title="$dbrow{'Title'}";

        if ($title =~ /^$layer/) {
            do something...
        }
    }
}
[download]

So if the first letter in the title is "A", then i will print out all the records where that's true. Right now i'm not getting anything. I don't think that i'm doing the match correctly. Someone Please Help. Thanxs - Kiko

Comment on Matching the first letter in a string Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Matching the first letter in a string by myocom (Deacon) on Jul 31, 2001 at 02:49 UTC
If you're going to match a fixed number of letters in a fixed position (e.g., the first letter), use substr instead: `if (substr($title,0,1) eq $layer) { # do something... }` [download] If you want the items checked regardless of case (that is, 'a' is treated the same as 'A'), force it to be lowercase: `if (lc(substr($title,0,1) eq lc($layer)) { # do something... }` [download] As a side note, you're doing some extraneous quoting in there too, on the assignment to $title. I'd suggest changing that line to: `my $title = $dbrow{Title};` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Matching the first letter in a string by tomhukins (Curate) on Jan 07, 2002 at 21:48 UTC
The original question concerned the first letter of $title, whereas your answer compares the first character. To match the first letter case insensitively, try: `my $title="$dbrow{'Title'}"; $title =~ m/([a-z])/i; # Match the first letter in $title if (lc($1) eq lc($layer)) { #do something... }` [download] NB. I'm using `[a-z]` rather than `\w` because `\w` includes the underscore character, which isn't a letter. Given that you seem to be working with results returned from a database, it's almost certainly better to check the first letter matches in the SQL query, rather than in the Perl code later on. Try something like `SELECT * FROM table WHERE field LIKE "A%"` to match records where `field` starts with the letter A.	[reply] [d/l] [select]