Re: Capturing the nth word in a string

Yet another way:

$_ = "ele1 ele2   ele3   ele4 ele5 ele6";
m/(\w+\s*){$ARGV[0]}/;
print $1;
[download]

pass in a parameter to indicate which word you want. (you can eaily turn this into a function). This does not create an array and saves space, assuming the only thing you care is the nth.

Comment on Re: Capturing the nth word in a string Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Capturing the nth word in a string by etcshadow (Priest) on Oct 14, 2003 at 05:04 UTC
Nice. Tiny changes, though... want nth char, not (n+1)th... also, you want \s+, not \s*... and might as well decide that by "word" we mean a run of non-whitespace (that is... probably a bad idea to mix \w and \S... so I'll just go with \S). `[me@host bin]$ perl -we '$n = $ARGV[0]; $_ = "a b csadf sdfas ddd"; /( +?:\S+\s+){@{[$n-1]}}(\S+)/; print "$1\n"' 1 a [me@host bin]$ perl -we '$n = $ARGV[0]; $_ = "a b csadf sdfas ddd"; /( +?:\S+\s+){@{[$n-1]}}(\S+)/; print "$1\n"' 2 b [me@host bin]$ perl -we '$n = $ARGV[0]; $_ = "a b csadf sdfas ddd"; /( +?:\S+\s+){@{[$n-1]}}(\S+)/; print "$1\n"' 4 sdfas [me@host bin]$` [download] ------------ :Wq Not an editor command: Wq	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Re: Capturing the nth word in a string by pg (Canon) on Oct 14, 2003 at 05:16 UTC
The reason I used \s* not \s+ is, to make it also work for the last word, as there is no space after that one.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Capturing the nth word in a string by etcshadow (Priest) on Oct 29, 2003 at 22:09 UTC
I think you misunderstand... \s not the same as \S. ------------ :Wq Not an editor command: Wq	[reply]