in reply to Noob Question - not sure what's wrong

"SB111" does indeed match the pattern. You want /^SB[0-9]{1,2}\z/i.

Then there's the issue that you use $& when no match occur, even though it's only set on match. I think you use !~ when you meant to use =~.

Then there's the issue that you use $&, which causes all non-capturing regex matches in your program to become slower. $sbNumHost1 would be a suitable replacement for $& here.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Noob Question - not sure what's wrong
by vishi (Beadle) on May 11, 2011 at 07:11 UTC

    Thanks ikegami,
    But I think I found what I was doing wrong. I simplified the code to this and it now works...

    while ($sbNumHost1 !~ m/^(SB)(\d{1,2})$/i)
{
    print "Enter the SB## \t: ";
    chomp($sbNumHost1 = ReadLine(0));
}
print "done\n";

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

      That matches "SB00\n" and you said it shouldn't. Replace /$/ with /\z/ to get the stated desired behaviour.

      \d can match more than 0-9. I presume you don't want to match arab digits.

      That uses needless captures. Get rid of them. 

      m/^(SB)(\d{1,2})$/i

      [download]
      should be 
      m/^SB[0-9]{1,2}\z/i

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom