Hello cellmates, I'm sitting staring at page 107 of the Learning Perl book and as far as I can see I'm doing exactly as required but....... All I want to do is ensure that a parameter supplied to a subroutine is exactly 3 digits. Nothing but numbers should be in this parameter. Easy? Well I thought so but the following example only fails if less than 3 numbers are supplied. If more than 3 numbers are supplied - even if some of the extra characters are non-digits - it passes the test!(?) Am I guily of an obvious typo or am I missing the point?
#!/usr/bin/perl -w # use strict ; # my $step = 'a123aaaa' ; # Produces True message # if ($step =~ /\d{3}/) { print "\n\tIt's true :: <$step>!\n" ; } else { print "\n\tIt's false :: <$step>!\n" ; }
This parameter must be exactly 3 characters in length and all the characters MUST be digits. What am I doing wrong? Be gentle I've already gone bald scratching my head over this one!

In reply to Another RegExp question by Ronnie

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.