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

Hi Fellows, I was wondering how I can match the word Guinea and not other country names such as Equatorial Guinea, etc. 
use strict;
use warnings;

while (<DATA>) {
    




if ($_ =~ m/\bGuinea\b/) {

print "We have a match\n";

# m/\bGuinea\b$/ matches Guinea at end 
#m/^\bGuinea\b$/ matches Guinea at the beginning

}

else {
    
    
    print "We do not have a match\n";
}

}




__DATA__
Papua New Guinea
I live in Guinea
Guinea Bissau
Equatorial Guinea

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Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Matching a Word Exactly
by karlgoethebier (Abbot) on Oct 09, 2014 at 11:30 UTC

    BTW, proper indention and omitting unnecessary whitespace isn't a bad thing :-)

    Read more... (593 Bytes)

    See also Perltidy.

    Best regards, Karl

    «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Matching Exact Word
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 09, 2014 at 09:16 UTC
[reply]
      sleepy i guess :) not anchors, but match an optional word before Guinea, then check 
      my( $word, $guinea ) = /(\w+)?\s*\b(Guinea)\b/;
if( $word eq ucfirst $word ){
   warn "Not the Guinea I want ($word $guinea)";
}

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

        This will fail in some cases.

        Geographically, Guinea is thousands of miles from here. (This fails immediately because of the comma; if the comma were removed, it would still fail.)

        If what you want is to match Guinea but not New Guinea or Equatorial Guinea, then what you probably really want is a negative lookbehind assertion that specifically rules out being preceded by "New " or "Equatorial ". Similarly, a negative lookahead assertion at the end can preclude Guinea Pig and Guinnea-Bisseau.

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