Obtain information from a string

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

Lets say I had a large string (stored in a variable) and in that string somewhere was the string "Total Cost: X", where X represents a arbitrary number. How could I store this value X in a variable of its own? And lets also say that if the above string is missing the stored value should be zero.

Comment on Obtain information from a string

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Re: Obtain information from a string by stephen (Priest) on Apr 29, 2002 at 22:17 UTC
You will find all of the information you need here: regular expressions. Also, the m operator manpage might be useful to you. stephen	[reply]
Re: Obtain information from a string by VSarkiss (Monsignor) on Apr 29, 2002 at 22:15 UTC
TIMTOWTDI, but this is probably the simplest: `if ($largestring =~ /Total Cost: (\d+)/) { $x = $1; } else { $x = 0; }` [download] HTH.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Obtain information from a string by thelenm (Vicar) on Apr 29, 2002 at 22:23 UTC
Use a regular expression. If you don't understand why this works, see perlre. Is "X" a dollar amount, an integer, or some other number format? This will work for integers: `my $string = "foo bar baz blah Total Cost: 480 foo foo foo"; my ($cost) = $string =~ /Total\s+Cost:\s*(\d+)/; $cost \|\|= 0;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]