Please read the OP and the variable names in the test code before slapping hands. You can be right from your implied point of view, but I had my rationale when posting (which implies that I tested my code, of course)

Here, I'm considering digits as a character class, not as components of a number whose semantic is different from that of a string; this is why I name my variable $start_digits, not $num as you do. As you've surely noted, the OP never talks about numbers, always about digits (anyway, as I noted in my post, the OP was not clear about the usage of this extracted data).

Thus, when I thought about putting "*" or "+"*, I considered that if there were no digits it was good, and the returned string would be empty.

I think you can agree with me that, had the OP asked for initial letters, the regex: 

   my $variable = "abc123";
   my ($letters) = $variable =~ /^([a-zA-Z]*)/;

[download]
would do the job.

*I swear I thought about that!

Flavio (perl -e 'print(scalar(reverse("\nti.xittelop\@oivalf")))')

Don't fool yourself.

In reply to Re^3: what is the best way to seperate the digits and strings from variable ? by polettix
in thread what is the best way to seperate the digits and strings from variable ? by swaroop

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