Re: the end of a word

Well, if all you want to do is remove the last character of a string, regardless of what it is, then:

chop $directory;
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will work. However, more is needed if you're looking to eliminate an indetermined amount of junk. A general regex to customize would be:

$directory =~ s/[^a-zA-Z]+$//;
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This will remove any non-letters from the end of the variable (the ^ negates the [] character class). If there are other valid word letters, change the character class as needed.

Comment on Re: the end of a word Select or Download Code

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Laziness is one of the three virtues! by jaldhar (Vicar) on Jul 22, 2002 at 20:31 UTC
`[^a-z-A-Z]` can be more succintly put as `\W` . (That's a capital W in case your font doesn't make it clear.) -- જલધર	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Laziness is one of the three virtues! by Ovid (Cardinal) on Jul 22, 2002 at 20:41 UTC
That's a common misconception regarding `\w` and `\W`. The "word" characters (depending upon locale) are typically letters, underscores, and digits. Thus, the `\W` will not remove underscores or digits from the end. `$ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/[^a-zA-Z]+$//;print' foobar $ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/\W+$//;print' foobar_ $ perl -e '$_="foobar9";s/\W+$//;print' foobar9` [download] Update: I pointed out a bug in your code only to realize a bug in mine :) My first example doesn't respect locale settings. I should be using POSIX character classes. `$ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/[[:^alpha:]]+$//;print' foobar` [download] Cheers, Ovid Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.	[reply] [d/l] [select]