Re: shrinking the path

A few remarks:

quotemeta, using "\Q" inside the regex (see also perlop), to search for literal substrings instead of a pattern
Do not put extra quotes in your substitution pattern, it'll cause it to fail
There's no need to match and substitute in two steps. s/// will just return a true flag if it indeed did substitute anything, and do nothing otherwise
Anchor the match to the beginning of the string, using ^, or you'll allow it to substitute anywhere in the string — unless that's what you want?

The resulting code is:

if($folder_path =~ s/^\Q$sourcedir/Eitv9/) {
            print "\n$folder_path/$file";}
[download]

Oh and if the path comes from the user using STDIN, don't forget to chomp it first.

Comment on Re: shrinking the path Download Code

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Re^2: shrinking the path by prad_intel (Monk) on Feb 01, 2005 at 11:18 UTC
Thanks bart ! it worked , even before posting i tried what boris had suggested but that lead to a failure why ? prad	[reply]
Re^3: shrinking the path by bart (Canon) on Feb 01, 2005 at 13:03 UTC
The difference is in my use of quotemeta, `\Q` inside the regex. His version uses your string as a regex, mine turns it into a literal search. Here is a simple demo for what's going on: `my $string = 'c:\\Windows'; my $search = '\\W'; my $qm = quotemeta($search); my $raw = $string; $raw=~ s/$search/#/; my $cooked = $string; $cooked =~ s/\Q$search/#/; print <<"TEST" original string: '$string' search string: '$search' search string after quotemeta: '$qm' substitution without \\Q: '$raw' substitution with \\Q: '$cooked' TEST` [download] Result: original string: 'c:\Windows' search string: '\W' search string after quotemeta: '\\W' substitution without \Q: 'c#\Windows' substitution with \Q: 'c:#indows' As you can see, with quotemeta, it replaced the substring backslash+"W", because that's what `/\\W/` searches for. Without it, it just searched for the first non-word character and replaced it — that happens to be a "`:`".	[reply] [d/l] [select]