toolic hit the nail on the head, but you might choose a different delimiter so that it wouldn't be necessary to escape the forward slash, like this: 

my $thing = 'foo/bar/goo';
( my $stuff ) = ( $thing =~ 
    m{                # Quote-like characters are now {}.
        ^             # Match at the start of the string.
        ( [^/]+ )     # Capture everything in the set of all
                      # characters that are not '/'
    }x                # Close the regexp. x modifier allows
                      # freeform (as in non-significant
                      # whitespace).
);
print "$stuff\n";

[download]

The m{} brackets avoid the leaning toothpick syndrome in the original regexp. Of course if you were matching against a curly bracket the curly brackets wouldn't be all that wonderful as quote delimiters, but for this regexp they work out well. /x modifier added to allow comments and insignificant whitespace (it makes everything prettier).


Dave

In reply to Re: Regex to get everything before first / by davido
in thread Regex to get everything before first / by limzz

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.