in reply to simple regex match question

* and . have special meaning within regexes. If the string you're passing as a pattern into your regular expression contains an asterisk, that is going to be interpreted as a quantifier. And '.' is interpreted to mean "any character except newline".

You could probably do it like this:

if ( $file =~ m/\Q$file_pattern\E$/ ) { # .......

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Also note the '$' which anchors the match to the righthand side of the filename. Otherwise, you might find yourself matching "filename.txt.xml" on accident.


Dave

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Re^2: simple regex match question
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 13, 2006 at 06:07 UTC
    That doesn't seem to work...well, it works, but returns no files. Here is my test code: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use Cwd;
use File::Find;
my $file_pattern  ="*.txt";
find(\&d, cwd);
sub d {
  my $file = $File::Find::name;
  return unless -f $file;
  return  unless $file =~ /\Q$file_pattern\E$/;
  print "text file:$file\n";
}

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[reply]
[d/l]

      I didn't know what you were doing, but now I get it.

      The * character is not a wildcard in Perl. That's a shell wildcard. You cannot expect a regular expression to recognize shell-style wildcards; they're different "languages".


      Dave

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