extract the data between slashes within a string of course

which might be more than one item.

   my $str  = '%/%/ISIN/US1252691001';

   my @strings = $str =~ m{(?<=/)[^/]+}g ;

   print join ', ', @strings, "\n";
   print $strings[1];
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Regards

mwa

print join ', ', @strings, "\n";

I'm not sure whether you intended a trailing ', ' in the output. If not, you could use parentheses

print join(', ', @strings), "\n";
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I might instead tinker with the list separator

print do
   {
       local $" = q{, };
       qq{@strings\n};
   };
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Cheers,

JohnGG

I'm not sure whether you intended a trailing ', ' in the output. If not, you could use parentheses

.oO you got me ...

If I'd say now "I didn't care if a trailing comma would show up" nobody would believe me. If I'd say "I tried to make the output of print "@strings\n"; more distinct for a beginner", the same would happen.

Therefore the best would be to take the blame and admit failure ;-)

Thanks & Regards

mwa

m{/(.*?)/}
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A second issue is if the string has empty slots between slashes, such as the string "%///US1252691001". You probably want to be able to return an empty result in this case, so I changed your use of .+ (one or more) to .* (zero or more) characters. Otherwise, you might get a match back of "/" for strings like my example.

Update: As others mentioned but I didn't parse correctly, to get the THIRD field (e.g., "~/~/THIS/~") takes a little more work. Instead of a bunch of complicated lookaheads and lookbehinds, or switching to a split() instead, I would just parse through. This has the advantage of easily changing the pattern to capture the other fields if the requirements change.

m{/.*?/(.*?)/}
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Adding a ? after the .+ would work fine

I might be missing something but I don't think that will work as desired. It will return the first item between slashes which is %, not ISIN. I think split might be better here. Something like

my $str  = '%/%/ISIN/US1252691001';
my @elems = split m{/}, $str;

my $isin = $elems[2];
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Cheers,

JohnGG

Update:

You need a more complex regex to do this without split using zero-width look-around assertions, an alternation of two look-behinds and a look-ahead with an alternation.

my @elems =
   $str =~ m{(?(?<=\A)|(?<=/))(.*?)(?=/|\z)}g;
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Also, keep in mind that he wants the contents of the *second* pair of slashes. Assuming that the first one with the percent sign is static, m{/\%/(.*?)/} might work. otherwise, he could grab all matches and filter out the wrong ones, or split the whole string beforehand:

# method 1
@matches = $string =~ m{/(.*?)/}g;

# method 2
@matches = split m{/}, $string;

# print the one you want
print $matches[1];
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__________
Systems development is like banging your head against a wall...
It's usually very painful, but if you're persistent, you'll get through it.

Unfortunately, your method 1 isn't going to do the trick because the regex is going to consume %/%/ when doing the first match and the next attempted match is left with ISIN/US1252691001 to work with so the match fails.

$ perl -le '
> $string = q{%/%/ISIN/US1252691001};
> @matches = $string =~ m{/(.*?)/}g;
> print for @matches;'
%
$
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Cheers,

JohnGG

I think we don't know enough about what he's looking for. It was said that he's looking for the text between the second pair of slashes. What if he is looking for the string between the last %/ and the very next / ? I think the input string is not described well enough in the original question. For all I can say, he could be looking for %/%/ as a fixed token, suck out all of the following characters until the first /, but this assumes all his input strings begin with %/%/ followed by what he needs to extract, which may not be a correct assumption.

won't /ISIN/ work for you?

I'd guess it won't work because that would fail to catch the other candidates like CUSIP, NSIN and probably even more - depending on the intention of the O.P.

Regards

mwa