Thanks so much. Now I'm thoroughly confused. Apparently the code I posted grabs the contents of $itemID which includes a number, but is the entire string like something-1234.html. What I really need to do is simply capture the 4 numbers in the string, or 5 numbers if it is a 5 digit numbers. There would be no other numbers in any of the urls. Perhaps there is a better way to achieve this. Can you tell me what each of these lines do? I think the first line takes the query string and sets it to $url. I'm not sure I know what the second line does. 
$url=q|$itemID|; 
$url=~/(\d{4})+\.htm/i;

[download]
Here's what I'm doing. I'm using this recipe in the .htaccess file to run a perl script to display a page, but it displays a .html file in the browser. 
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1 [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /cgi-bin/getpage.pl?itemID=$1

[download]
So in the script getpage.pl, I grab the $itemID with the code above and turn it into a filename. I search the database for a filename field that includes the page. Sometimes it's 1234.html, other times it's something-something-1234.html. It would really be best to simply grab the 1234 but I don't know how to do that.

In reply to Re^2: Grabbing numbers from a URL by htmanning
in thread Grabbing numbers from a URL by htmanning

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.