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

I have a transform subroutine thats supposed to execute a transform and return a page based on authentication and sitecode (url) this is on iis and activestate perl my url(s) for one product are of the form a-z,1,3.productname1help.com and the other side are a-z1,5.productname2help.com, I would think if its not a match that it would just grab the proper transform but apparently it doesn't. How do I build the proper regex they are confusing to me. code example I know this is wrong..just not sure how to formulate this 
 sub transform
  {
      if (!$Session->{'isAuthenticated'}) 
      { 
       if ($Request->ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME")->item()=~ /[a-z][1
+,3]&& productname1help/s')
         {
        #$Response->write("Hey its product1help address");

        my $trns= $Server->MapPath("Transforms/pLogin.xsl");
        return $trns;
      }

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of course this is going to be followed by the check for product2name which would call a different transform with additional elements

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Re: puzzled by pages
by pc88mxer (Vicar) on Jun 10, 2008 at 19:58 UTC
    I think you want to use curly braces {1,3} here: 
    ... ->item()=~ /[a-z][1,3]&& productname1help/s')
                     ^   ^                     ^?
                     |   |                     |

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    Also, I'm not sure what the trailing single-quote is all about.
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    Re: puzzled by pages
    by kyle (Abbot) on Jun 10, 2008 at 19:37 UTC

      I can't tell from your description what you're trying to match. If you could give some examples of what the pattern should and should not match, that might help. Lacking that, I can only point you to perlretut, perlrequick, and perlre.

    		[reply]
        product1name is always the same, I want to allow for 84 different prefixes to be checked they are always at least 3 characters the product1name is the end of the url I am checking, I need this to switch to a personalized login message depending on which url for the site visitors land on.
    		[reply]

          Perhaps this pattern is what you need. 

          $server_name =~ m{
    \A                   # start of string
    .{1,3}               # 1-3 characters
    \.                   # a literal period
    product1help\.com    # literal 'product1help.com'
}xms;

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          If you want to know what the prefix matched actually was, use this: 

          $server_name =~ m{
    \A                   # start of string
    (                    # start capture 1
        .{1,3}           # 1-3 characters
    )                    # end capture 1
    \.                   # a literal period
    product1help\.com    # literal 'product1help.com'
}xms;
my $prefix = $1;

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