help in matching

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

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Re: help in matching by Fletch (Bishop) on Feb 08, 2006 at 15:07 UTC
The '`-`' character is for ranges, but only inside a character class. `/[a-d]/` would match one single character 'a', 'b', 'c', or 'd'. `/a-d/` matches an 'a' followed by a '-' followed by a 'd'. Your regex would match a dash followed by 'process' (i.e. '-process'); since your sample data does not contain a dash followed by 'process' the match fails.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: help in matching by mickeyn (Priest) on Feb 08, 2006 at 15:13 UTC
in this case the RE just looks for the character '-' which does not precede 'process'. to be used as range operator it should be placed within a character class. Enjoy, Mickey	[reply]
Re: help in matching by MCS (Monk) on Feb 08, 2006 at 17:01 UTC
What you are currently doing is searching for "-process" in this $_ (magic operator) which you have assigned the value 'process1.' Running this yields nothing because '-process' is not in 'process1.' A better approach would be: `my $string = 'process1'; if ($string =~ /process/) { print "success"; }` [download] This searches $string for the text "process." (for more information on these matches read up on regular expressions)	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: help in matching by uva (Sexton) on Feb 09, 2006 at 04:55 UTC
thanks for your replies friends..... i understood..	[reply]
Re: help in matching by svenXY (Deacon) on Feb 08, 2006 at 15:15 UTC
Hi, range operator here means that e.g. `[a-z]` means one character in the range of a-z. If you want your example to match, just omit the hyphen and it will match. It is however not a good idea to set $_ as it is a magic variable ( see perlvar). Regards, svenXY	[reply] [d/l]