Also Q&D:

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s = 'hostname.ms.com';
 $s =~ s{ [.] .* \z }''xms;
 print qq{'$s'};
"
'hostname'
[download]

Thank you AnomalousMonk (Vicar).

A few follow up questions. what is "-wMstrict -le" mean?

Also, can you explain this line a bit more? $s =~ s{ . .* \z }''xms; what does the \z and xms mean?

When posting code, you need to wrap it in <code> tags so it doesn't get mangled - see Markup in the Monastery.

Command line switches are documented in perlrun. The switches -w, -Mstrict, -l, and -e enable warnings, strict, automatic chomps and one-liner execution respectively.

When you have questions about regular expressions, the go-to sources are perlre and perlretut. In this case, Assertions in perlre says

\z  Match only at end of string

and Modifiers in perlre says:

m

Treat string as multiple lines. That is, change "^" and "$"
from matching the start or end of the string to matching 
the start or end of any line anywhere within the string.

s

Treat string as single line. That is, change "." to match 
any character whatsoever, even a newline, which normally it 
would not match.

Used together, as /ms, they let the "." match any character 
whatsoever, while still allowing "^" and "$" to match, 
respectively, just after and just before newlines within 
the string.

x

Extend your pattern's legibility by permitting whitespace 
and comments. Details in /x
[download]

See also /x.

thank you Kennethk. A follow up question. I am reading that the ^. is a metacharacter to indicated beginning of the string. So is if the variable is:

hostname.ms.com

is the ^. ignoring the "hostname" part of the string and just picking up the " .ms.com "? Also, why does the ^. have to be in brackets?

On the first position inside square brackets, ^ has a different meaning: it is a negation. So, [^.] means anything but a dot.

Hello Everyone, Thank you for your help. I think I found a solution. It may not be as pretty as the ones supplied (I am still researching what those special characters mean) but I think it will work. If anyone see's a flaw in this code, please let me know as I will be implementing into my production environment very soon. Thanks, Jaime

#my $hostname = 'name.ms.com';

my $hostname = 'name';

print $hostname;

if ($hostname =~ /\.ms.com$/) {

print "\nthis is true";

@nameparts = split(/\./,$hostname);

print "\n";

print $nameparts[0];

print "\n";

print $nameparts1;

print "\n";

print $nameparts2;

$firstpart = $nameparts[0];

print "\n";

print $firstpart;

}

else {

print "\nthis is false";

}

As I said above, please wrap code in <code> tags -- see Markup in the Monastery. Note that your array indices got linkified because you did not.

While there are multiple ways in which code I might write differs from the above, I would point out that /\.ms.com$/ misses an escape - you probably mean /\.ms\.com$/. An easy way to avoid missing escapes is to use \Q...\E - /\Q.ms.com\E$/.