Hi, again, folks...

I'm trying to work-out a simple/reliable regex to deal with printf 'format' strings with shell globs.

I've experimented a lot and had a look on-line... I've gone though the O'Reilly books (Perl & Regular Expression books, cookbooks, etc) and although they mention glob2pat sub (Perl Cookbook, Sect 6.9), that converts the wrong way (but see Bug in glob2pat?)... and I can't work out an 'elegant' regex to do the job I need to do.

Although... the following works Ok... but it appears pretty long-winded and ugly to me... and I'm guessing there must be a cleaner way to do it... 

use Data::Dumper;

($match) = (@ARGV);                        # Get the 'printf format' s
+tring to match
printf("   \$match: >%s<\n\n", $match);    # Input as `Img%04d.png` (b
+ackprime quoted)

$match =~ /([\w]+)(%[0-9]+d)\.([\w]+)/i;   # EX: Img%04d.png
$prefix = $1; $format = $2; $ext = $3;
printf("  \$prefix: >%s<\n", $prefix);
printf("  \$format: >%s<\n", $format);
printf("     \$ext: >%s<\n\n", $ext);

$format =~ /%([0-9]+)d/;                   # Note the '%04d' portion
$count = $1;

$glob_str = sprintf("%s%s\.%s",            # ...and build the DOS/glob
+ match strings
                    $prefix, "\*", $ext);
$grep_str = sprintf("%s[0-9]{%d}\.%s", 
                    $prefix, $count, $ext);
printf("\$glob_str: >%s<\n", $glob_str);  
printf("\$grep_str: >%s<\n\n", $grep_str);  

@tmpfiles = glob($glob_str);               # Get all the glob-matched 
+files
printf("\@tmpfiles:\n");                   # ...EX: Img*.png
print Dumper(@tmpfiles);
printf("\n");

@files = grep(/$grep_str/i, @tmpfiles);    # Filter to match the 'prin
+tf format'
printf("\@files:\n");
print Dumper(@files);
printf("\n");

[download]

In this case, I'm looking at running ActiveState Perl 5.16.3 under Win32, although I'll probably also need it to work under a similar Perl version on Linux as well.

I'd greatly appreciate any guidance, please.

Thanks a heap.

In reply to How can I use printf FORMAT strings for (Win32) shell globs? by ozboomer

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