If all you want is 09, then just ask for it:

/^DATETIME (\d\d):/;
print "$1\n";
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HTH

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
my $data='DATETIME 09:59:11';
 
my (@sout) = split /[\s,:]/, $data;
print $sout[1];
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Plankton, great answer! Now you can use a array slice to throw away what you don't need:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
my $data='DATETIME 09:59:11';
 
my $sout = (split /[\s,:]/, $data)[1];
print $sout ."\n";
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Later

Hi AM,

This should do what you want. See perldoc -f split

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings FATAL => 'all';

my $str = "DATETIME 09:59:11";
my $time =  (split " ", $str)[1];
my ($h,$m,$s) =  split ':', $time;
print $h;
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Hope this helps

thinker

Somewhat daft but I notice that no one has mentioned the third argument to split yet:



use strict;
use warnings FATAL => 'all'; # ;)

my( $one, $two ) = split /:/, q[DATETIME 09:59:11], 2;

print substr( $one, -2 );
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From perldoc -f split:

If LIMIT is specified and positive, it represents the maximum number of fields the EXPR will be split into, though the actual number of fields returned depends on the number of times PATTERN matches within EXPR.