Hi,

was wondering what would be the best way to capture a number from a string that has both words and numbers.

The string is compoased of pairs of data that is a name (which could be more than one word) and a number associated with it, and each pair is delimited with a colon. For my example I'd like to capture only the first number from the first data pair in the string.

String looks like :

Happy Joy 002245:Dubloons 002256:hats 034523:paper clips 232344:pants 233394

So I just need to grab the first number 002245 from the string. I've tried splitting the data on a colon and then trying to capture the number but for some reason its not working. Any simple suggestions? Thanks!

sorry about not including what I was doing earlier....here's what I was attempting:

$string = Happy Joy 002245:Dubloons 002256:hats 034523:paper clips 232
+344:pants 233394;

@items = split (/:/, $string);
$number = split(/\d+/, $items[0]);

[download]

So instead of getting a value in $number I was getting just a "1" or "2". I couldn't figure out how I could use a regex just to grab what I needed. But I got davidos to work for me with: $number = $1 if $items[0]=~ m/(\d+)/;

Thanks guys!

Edited by Chady -- fixed formatting.

In reply to getting a number from a string by shaezi

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