OK, I've got two questions.

The first, I'll probably figure out on my own in due time, but the second might be Acatualy Interesting.

Question the first: I've got a bunch of filenames of the form "id.ext". I want to sepperate it into the id part and the extention part. Now, I could do this with a simple split '.', $filename. However, that won't work if the id part contains dots. The way I'm attempting to do it now is with m@^(.*)\.(.*?)$@ (in list context). This doesn't work; it returns the empty list.

<lh>Now, I've got several questions:</lh>
• Why doesn't it work?
• What would be the proper way to write this regex?
• Is the best way to do this with a regex at all, or by somthing like splitting and joining again, or reversing the string and splitting it?

The other question is this: Will a regex of the form .*c ever match differently from [^c]*c, and if not, why doesn't the regex parser optimize it to the later form? What if the first was .*?c

Thanks,
James Mastros,
Just Another Perlmonks Novice

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