in reply to Matching the first letter in a string

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...
}

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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...
}

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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};

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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...
}

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    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.

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