How do i take the first 4 characters of any file name in a specified directory?

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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: How do i take the first 4 characters of any file name in a specified directory? by dHarry (Abbot) on Sep 17, 2008 at 06:26 UTC
How about the substr function? I would use something differrent to read the content of a directory: the opendir, readdir and closedir functions. Also the strict and warnings pragma's are missing.	[reply]
Re: How do i take the first 4 characters of any file name in a specified directory? by lamp (Chaplain) on Sep 17, 2008 at 06:26 UTC
You can use 'printf' function for printing the first 4 characters of a file name. For eg. `opendir(DIR, "/tmp") \|\| die "can't opendir $!"; while (my $file = readdir(DIR)) { next unless (-f "/tmp/$file"); printf '%.4s', $file; } closedir DIR;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: How do i take the first 4 characters of any file name in a specified directory? by pjotrik (Friar) on Sep 17, 2008 at 07:52 UTC
In the spirit of TMTOWTDI: `$name =~ /^(.{0,4})/ && print "$1\n";` [download] In the matter of obtaining the filenames, I fully agree with dHarry, use readdir & co.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: How do i take the first 4 characters of any file name in a specified directory? by moritz (Cardinal) on Sep 17, 2008 at 07:59 UTC
Don't forget the `/s` modifier on your regex, because a file name could actually contain a newline character (at least on unix-like platforms that's allowed).	[reply] [d/l]
Re: How do i take the first 4 characters of any file name in a specified directory? by cstrong (Beadle) on Sep 17, 2008 at 10:14 UTC
As the number of columns provided in ls -l are constant, how about splitting out each element of the column in to a variable and then matching the first four characters of the filename? @namearr = `ls -l`; foreach $nameline (@namearr) { chomp $nameline; print ("'$nameline'\n"); ($var1, $var2, $var3, $var4, $var5, $var6, $var7, $var8, $name) = ( +split " ", $nameline); $name =~ s/^(\w{4}).+/$1/; print ("NAME '$name'\n"); } [download] The regex part matches the first four characters and substitutes the match in to the $name variable	[reply] [d/l]
Re: How do i take the first 4 characters of any file name in a specified directory? by jonadab (Parson) on Sep 17, 2008 at 12:09 UTC
`@name1 = $nameline;` I am almost certain this line doesn't do what you think it does. There are other ways to solve the problem, but if what you want is to assign all the characters in a string to an array, you can use the split function with an empty regex. Also, the print on the next line only prints out one of the array elements (specifically, the number 3 element, i.e., the fourth). If you want several elements at once, use slice syntax. HTH.HAND. -- We're working on a six-year set of freely redistributable Vacation Bible School materials.	[reply] [d/l]