Re: Re: Grabbing first column of text

You simply want to use ($first) = $line =~ /(\S*)/;
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I believe that the original poster also wanted to capture a series of blank spaces, if that was what occupied the first element of a line.

\S matches non-whitespace characters only. . .

. . . the split solutions seem much more well-suited.

--twerq

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Re: Re: Re: Grabbing first column of text by Anonymous Monk on Aug 02, 2001 at 22:52 UTC
No, if you'll read the entire post, you'll notice that I said "... if the line begins with spaces or is empty, I just want to print out a blank line..." Anyway, the first two examples here do just what I'm looking for. Thanks, guys!	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Grabbing first column of text by japhy (Canon) on Aug 02, 2001 at 22:53 UTC
No, the original post says: As you can see, if the line begins with spaces or is empty, I just want to print out a blank line so I can tell that there was something there. He either wants the column of text, or nothing. That is what I give him. _____________________________________________________ Jeff `japhy` Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker. `s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;`	[reply]