SOLVED Printing last two characters

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

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Re: Printing last two characters by FunkyMonk (Bishop) on Jan 03, 2008 at 11:26 UTC
I wouldn't use a regexp, I'd use substr: `print substr "1234,Dr,Huxtable,Cliff,M,24/12/1976,60", -2, 2; #Output: 60` [download] The second argument is the start position, with negative numbers mean from the end of the string and the third argument is how many characters to extract.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Printing last two characters by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jan 03, 2008 at 12:10 UTC
Note that `substr($str, -2, 2)` can also be written as `substr($str, -2)` since `substr` defaults to extracting the rest of the string.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Printing last two characters by bart (Canon) on Jan 03, 2008 at 11:46 UTC
`\Z` is an assertion or anchor, it matches at a position (the end of the string, or in front of a final newline — you probably ment to use `\z` instead), but it doesn't match anything with a nonzero length. And then you're asking, with `{2}`, to match it twice... or rather, you're asking it not to match. It's all very confusing. I'm sure you're feeling that way... :) What you should try to match, is two characters, followed by the end of the string. I can do it like this: `/..\z/` [download] with capturing parens to capture these two characters: `/(..)\z/` [download] or maybe like this: `/(.{2})\z/` [download] After it matches, you can read the captured value out of $1, or you can put it directly into a variable like this: `($sight) = /(.{2})\z/;` [download] which will leave `$sight` undefined if it fails to match. Note the parens on the left, it tells the assignment operator `=` it's being called in list context, so the regexp returns a list of captures, and it assigns the first item in the returned list to the variable `$sight`. HTH.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Printing last two characters by reasonablekeith (Deacon) on Jan 03, 2008 at 11:40 UTC
Firstly, you don't need a regex to pull the last two characters off your data. Use substr instead... `my $string = "1234,Dr,Huxtable,Cliff,M,24/12/1976,60"; my $last_two_chars = substr($string, -2, 2); print $last_two_chars . "\n";` [download] Secondly, as you're passing comma delimited data, just pulling two chars seems over simplified, best to split it by comma (assuming no commas in your data, see Text::CSV for better parsing), give your columns some proper names, and access your data in a readable fashion... `my $temp_col_id = 0; my %COLUMN_IDS_BY_NAME = map {$_, $temp_col_id++} qw(num1 title surnam +e firstname sex dob num2); my @split_data = split /,/, $string; print $split_data[$COLUMN_IDS_BY_NAME{num1}] . "\n"; print $split_data[$COLUMN_IDS_BY_NAME{title}] . "\n"; print $split_data[$COLUMN_IDS_BY_NAME{firstname}] . "\n"; # etc...` [download] --- my name's not Keith, and I'm not reasonable.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Printing last two characters by moritz (Cardinal) on Jan 03, 2008 at 11:41 UTC
The best solution using substr was already posted, so let me just add an explanation why `m/\Z{2}/` doesn't work. `\Z` matches not a character, but a position. So it's useless to say "match end of the string, and then again end of the string". With warnings enabled perl would have told you: `Quantifier unexpected on zero-length expression in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/\Z{2} <-- HERE / at -e line 1.` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Printing last two characters by olus (Curate) on Jan 03, 2008 at 11:36 UTC
If you want a regexp, this will work `/(.{2})$/` [download] The '$' means the end of the string. `perl -le 'my $str="qwerty"; $str=~m/(.{2})$/; print $1;' #output ty` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: SOLVED Printing last two characters by Slug (Acolyte) on Jan 03, 2008 at 11:49 UTC
Thanks everyone, the response was overwhelming. I can see I'm going to like this forum.	[reply]