Pattern finding and printing with regex

kernelpanic@thedisco has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm pretty new to perl and I'm taking a metagenomics course; for our homework, we have to use regular expressions, take a fasta file and print out the sequence IDs, then state how many sequences were found. I've got the regex to find the right pattern and I can print all the right information out, but since my prof uses a tester to check all of our homework, if our output isn't exactly what he wants, it's wrong. For his expected output, he wants something like:

1: foo

2: bar

3: baz

Found 3 sequences.

I can do that, but I can't quite get my program to not print out the '>' in front of the sequence ID. My output right now looks like this:

1: >foo

2: >bar

3: >baz

Found 3 sequences.

How can I get it to not print out that '>'? Thanks for any help you can give!

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie;
use feature 'say';
my $i    = 0;
my $file = shift @ARGV;
my $pattern;
open my $fh, '<', $file;
while (my $line = <$fh>) {
        chomp $line;
        $pattern  = '>';
        if ($line =~ /^$pattern/) {
                $i++;
                print "$i: $line \n";
        }

}
printf "Found %s sequence%s.\n", $i, $i == 1 ? '' : 's';
[download]

Comment on Pattern finding and printing with regex Download Code

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Re: Pattern finding and printing with regex by toolic (Bishop) on Oct 21, 2015 at 18:29 UTC
One way: `use warnings; use strict; my $i = 0; my $pattern; while (my $line = <DATA>) { chomp $line; $pattern = '>'; if ($line =~ s/^$pattern//) { $i++; print "$i: $line \n"; } } __DATA__ >foo` [download] Now it's up to you to figure out how you explain to your professor that someone on the internet did your homework for you.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Pattern finding and printing with regex by AppleFritter (Vicar) on Oct 21, 2015 at 20:04 UTC
Now it's up to you to figure out how you explain to your professor that someone on the internet did your homework for you. Your heart is in the right place, but brother, I think you're being too harsh! He didn't ask the monks to do his homework for him, he did what he could and only asked for our help when he got stuck, sharing the code he had already written. Surely that is fair in the Monastery.	[reply]
Re^2: Pattern finding and printing with regex by kernelpanic@thedisco (Initiate) on Oct 21, 2015 at 18:40 UTC
Thanks for your help.	[reply]
Re: Pattern finding and printing with regex by jeffa (Bishop) on Oct 21, 2015 at 18:28 UTC
It helps us more if you provide the data too, but as it stands you should only need to add `$line =~ s/^$pattern//;` [download] before you print the matched line. jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Pattern finding and printing with regex by kernelpanic@thedisco (Initiate) on Oct 21, 2015 at 18:38 UTC
Thanks! That did it.	[reply]
Re: Pattern finding and printing with regex by BillKSmith (Monsignor) on Oct 21, 2015 at 21:39 UTC
A more general solution is to write your regex to find the sequence ID rather than removing the '>' character. `$pattern = qr/^(\w*)/; if ($line =~ /$pattern/) { my $id = $1; $I++; print "$i: $id \n"; }` [download] This approach would exclude the optional sequence description if it were included in the fasta file. UPDATE: AnomalousMonk is correct. I accidentally omitted the '<' from my regex. Bill	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Pattern finding and printing with regex by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Oct 22, 2015 at 01:33 UTC
But `qr/^(\w)/` won't capture anything — or more precisely, it will match and capture the empty string. Maybe try something like `qr/^>(\w)/` instead: `c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le "my $line = '>CATCATCATCAT'; ;; my $pattern = qr/^>(\w*)/; if ($line =~ /$pattern/) { my $id = $1; print qq{got: '$id'}; } " got: 'CATCATCATCAT'` [download] Give a man a fish: `<%-{-{-{-<`	[reply] [d/l] [select]