Pattern match

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

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Re: Pattern match by davido (Cardinal) on Jan 17, 2006 at 21:15 UTC
The problem you have is that you're misunderstanding quantification of metacharacters, and metacharacters themselves. `\w` matches one "word" character, not a bunch of characters. \w also does not match "5.0.29.0", for example. Also, '.' matches any character except for newline, so it must be escaped, as in \. if you want it to be seen as a literal character in the pattern match. You probably want something more like this: `m/Rescue21.+patch.+DiffList\.txt/` [download] ...or... `{ local $_ = $mystring; if( /Rescue21/ && /patch/ && /DiffList.txt/ ) { #.... } }` [download] ...though the latter would give a false positive if the filename looked like "DiffList.txt_patch_Rescue21". In other words, the latter solution wouldn't reject matches where the keywords appeared out of order. Dave	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Pattern match by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jan 17, 2006 at 21:16 UTC
`\w` only matches one character. It won't match literal dots. You might do better with `m/Rescue21[\w\.]+_patch_[\w.]+DiffList.txt/`. (I didn't test it.)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Pattern match by esskar (Deacon) on Jan 17, 2006 at 21:14 UTC
`$mystring = "Rescue21_binaries_V5.0.29.0_patch_R5.0.24.1_DiffList.txt" +; if( $mystring =~ m/Rescue21._patch_.DiffList.txt/ ) { print "Matched\n"; }` [download] i suggest you read perldoc perlretut and perldoc perlre	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Pattern match by SamCG (Hermit) on Jan 17, 2006 at 21:46 UTC
I might add the "Difflist.txt" portion of your pattern will match Difflist.txt, Difflistntxt, or Difflist&txt. If you mean a literal dot, you either need to escape it or (as another poster did) put it into a character class. A character class is a grouping of possible characters you're looking for, surrounded by square brackets. `[0-9.]`, for example, would look for any digit or the literal period.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Pattern match by ercparker (Hermit) on Jan 18, 2006 at 00:33 UTC
you can also check that it matches the characters you're looking for followed by one or more non-space, such as: `my $mystring = "Rescue21_binaries_V5.0.29.0_patch_R5.0.24.1_DiffList.t +xt"; if($mystring =~ m/Rescue21[^\s]+?patch[^\s]+?DiffList.txt/ ) { print "Matched" . "\n"; }` [download] hope that helps	[reply] [d/l]