in reply to Re: Fiddling around with reg-ex
in thread Fiddling around with reg-ex

I'm sorry I wasn't very explicit. Basically, these statements occur as part of an if statement and I am trying to determine if the strings "/home", "/mail", or "cat: cannot open /home/$username/$file" occur in the variable $columns[0]. If, for example, "/home" does occur in the variable as part of a string, I want to display the contents of the variable. If it does not occur, I want to display an error to the user. My problem is with the regular expression. In psudo-code, my statement would be something like: 
if (the string within $columns[0] contains the substring "/home")
{ 
  take an action
}

[download]
I know that PHP can search for substrings with a function, but I am not sure how to do this in perl and am wondering if there is a function to do this or if I must use regular expressions. Thanks for your input; I'll try to make my posts a bit more explicit.

updated 2003-06-24 by mirod: replaced [ and ] by [ and ] respectively.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Re: Fiddling around with reg-ex
by sgifford (Prior) on Jun 23, 2003 at 21:02 UTC
    Then what you want is: 
    if ($columns[0] =~ /"\/home"/)
{
  take an action;
}

    [download]
    and so forth. This assumes you really want the quotes in the string; if you don't, just remove them from the regex.
[reply]
[d/l]
      This syntax worked well. It is exactly what I am looking for. Thank you very much.
[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Fiddling around with reg-ex
by hsweet (Pilgrim) on Jun 24, 2003 at 00:36 UTC
    If I understand your question , you might be able to use alteration as in if ($var=~/home|mail|cat: cannot open/){do whatever}

    You might not need to match the entire last string as long as the part you match is unique. I'd try to stay away from the $username stuff since it can change

    Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like banannas

[reply]
[d/l]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom