G'day ozboomer,

"... but it appears pretty long-winded and ugly to me ..."

Agreed. I think you've thrown far too much code into that solution. In your first regex, you have character classes inside character classes ([\w]); and a pointless 'i' modifier (aim to avoid that anyway as it slows down the regex). You seem to have gone somewhat overboard with sprintf usage to create a regex; qr// would have been a better choice in my opinion (I've used it in the code below).

Here's the guts of what I think you need:

my @parts = $ARGV[0] =~ /^(\w+)%(\d+)d[.](\w+)$/;
$parts[1] =~ s/^0*//;
my $re = qr{(?x: ^ $parts[0] \d{$parts[1]} [.] $parts[2] $ )};
my $glob_str = "$parts[0]*.$parts[2]";
print for grep { /$re/ } glob $glob_str;
[download]

It would have been useful if you'd put together sample data, test input and actual/expected output. I dummied up these filenames for testing:

$ ls -1 Img*
Img.png
Img.svg
Img0000.png
Img1.png
Img12.png
Img123.png
Img1234.png
Img12345.png
Img1239.png
[download]

I put those five lines of code into a script (pm_1195222_fmt_glob_re.pl) so that you can see each stage (much as your OP code does).

#!/usr/bin/perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;

print 'Command line arg:';
print $ARGV[0];

my @parts = $ARGV[0] =~ /^(\w+)%(\d+)d[.](\w+)$/;
print "Parts: @parts";

$parts[1] =~ s/^0*//;
print "Parts (after stripping zeros): @parts";

my $re = qr{(?x: ^ $parts[0] \d{$parts[1]} [.] $parts[2] $ )};
print "Filter RE: $re";

my $glob_str = "$parts[0]*.$parts[2]";
print "Glob string: $glob_str";

print 'Found files:';
print for grep { /$re/ } glob $glob_str;
[download]

Here's a couple of sample runs (the first using your "Img%04d.png" string).

$ pm_1195222_fmt_glob_re.pl 'Img%04d.png'
Command line arg:
Img%04d.png
Parts: Img 04 png
Parts (after stripping zeros): Img 4 png
Filter RE: (?^:(?x: ^ Img \d{4} [.] png $ ))
Glob string: Img*.png
Found files:
Img0000.png
Img1234.png
Img1239.png
[download]

$ pm_1195222_fmt_glob_re.pl 'Img%03d.png'
Command line arg:
Img%03d.png
Parts: Img 03 png
Parts (after stripping zeros): Img 3 png
Filter RE: (?^:(?x: ^ Img \d{3} [.] png $ ))
Glob string: Img*.png
Found files:
Img123.png
[download]

You might also be interested in Win32::Autoglob.

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