in reply to matching a defined lenght

It seems that people have given four main methods of 'matching' 30 characters:

substr $string, 0, 30; 
  # will extract UP TO the first 30 characters of the string.

$string =~ m/(.{30})/; 
  # will extract the first 30 characters, if the string is AT LEAST 30
+ characters long

$string =~ m/.{30}/; 
  # tests if the string is AT LEAST 30 characters long

length($string) == 30;
  # tests if the string is 30 characters long.

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the last two are different in that return true/false, without trying to extract the first 30 characters, but they'll give different results for greater than 30 characters ... the first two are different at less than 30 characters:

my @strings = (
  join ('', 'a' .. 'z' ),
  join ('', 'a' .. 'z', 0 .. 3 ),
  join ('', 'a' .. 'z', 0 .. 9 ),
);
foreach my $string (@strings) {
  print "\nstring : $string\n";
  print 'length : ', length($string), "\n";
  print 'substr : ', substr( $string, 0, 30 ), "\n";
  print 'regex  : ', ( $string =~ m/.{30}/ ), "\n";
  print 'regex  : ', ( $string =~ m/(.{30})/ ), "\n";
}

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produces:

string : abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
length : 26
substr : abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
regex  : 
regex  : 

string : abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123
length : 30
substr : abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123
regex  : 1
regex  : abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123

string : abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789
length : 36
substr : abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123
regex  : 1
regex  : abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123

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