Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

This is probably pretty simple for Regular Expression experts like you guys. So thanks a lot in advance. I am trying to extract the fully-qualified path of the parent folder of a file. For example, if I have a fully-qualified path for a file "C:\Temp\Stuff\test.txt", I want to have a regular expression that will return me the string "C:\Temp\Stuff". Ideally this will need to work on files with or without extensions. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot!
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Re: RegEx to get filepath for parent folder
by davido (Cardinal) on Mar 06, 2004 at 06:34 UTC
    This is really more of a job for the File::Basename module than a job for a goofy regexp. With the module you could just do this: 

    use File::Basename;
my $dirname = dirname ("lib/this/that/other.txt");

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    However, if you're sure that the path delimeter is a slash (either forward or backslash), and that the slash characters won't comprise part of a name, you could probably get away with a regexp like this: 

    ($path, $filename) = $fullpath =~ m/^(.*[/\\])([^/\\]+)/;

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    Since it's easy to goof the Regexp (and mine is untested), you're better off using the module mentioned above. It's a lot better to rely on good tested code than a homebrewed complicated regexp, most of the time.

    Update: I wanted to note that File::Spec and File::Basename are both part of the core Perl distribution, and thus, probably came standard with your implementation of Perl.


    Dave

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      Thank you so very much. Did not know about the existence of File::Basename. Worked like a charm!
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Re: RegEx to get filepath for parent folder
by leira (Monk) on Mar 06, 2004 at 06:31 UTC
    I think the File::Spec module will give you what you need.

    Linda

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