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

Hi All, I have a script that has the current path as a variable. I need to get just the folder name from the path. Here is an example.
The directory: "c:/mail/test2" - should produce "test2"

The directory: "c:/mail" - should produce "mail" and so on and so forth.

Is this best handled with Regex? and what would the regex look like.

Thanks

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: get folder name only
by dmorelli (Scribe) on Mar 09, 2005 at 17:39 UTC
    There's actually a "core" module for parsing paths, see perldoc File::Basename 

    #! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use File::Basename;

print dirname 'c:/mail/test2';

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[select]
      Something was bugging me about this, basename returns nothing if the path ends with a dir separator. This will deal with that: 

      #! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use File::Basename;


# Test data
my @dirs = (
    'c:/mail/test2',
    'c:/mail',
    'c:/mail/test2/',
    'c:/mail/',
);

foreach (@dirs) {
    print "before: $_   ";

    # Strip off the trailing /
    # Warning: may not be platform independent
    s|/$||;

    print "after: " . basename $_ . $/;
}

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Re: get folder name only
by davido (Cardinal) on Mar 09, 2005 at 17:37 UTC

    If using a regexp...:

    if( $string =~ m![/\\]([^/\\]+)$! ) {
    print $1, "\n";
}

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    This works as long as you're dealing only with paths where there isn't a trailing filename. And of course it would run amok if the path didn't start with either a / or a \, or if a directory name allowed embedded / or \ characters. :) caviet lector.


    Dave

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Re: get folder name only
by RazorbladeBidet (Friar) on Mar 09, 2005 at 17:41 UTC
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