simple question

sweepy838 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, very much a pathetic question but i have a string containing special characters, letters and numbers.

$str = 'xxia5ujcjzbgdiaknqybacf1uhm?6nd9q0icmjloztk?k@i3d@6b';
my @numbers = $str =~ /(\d+)/g; #grab all numbers
my @chars=split(//,$str); #convert to char array
[download]

now sinse i have all the numbers, i'd like to loop through the char array and print out only the non numberic characters. using replace would do the job but that seems like going the long way ?

Comment on simple question Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: simple question by moritz (Cardinal) on May 05, 2012 at 21:12 UTC
You already know how to test if a character is numeric. Why don't you just apply that knowledge before printing out the characters? Or you could create the array of only non-numeric characters in the first place. Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed	[reply]
Re: simple question by JavaFan (Canon) on May 05, 2012 at 22:04 UTC
`print $str =~ /\D+/g;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: simple question by Kenosis (Priest) on May 05, 2012 at 21:53 UTC
It's not a pathetic question! And moritz is right: "...you could create the array of only non-numeric characters in the first place." If only there was a way to represent the following in such a regex: not 0-9. You're almost there...	[reply]
Re: simple question by tobyink (Canon) on May 05, 2012 at 21:46 UTC
`print for grep { not /\d/ } @chars;` [download] `perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: simple question by BillKSmith (Monsignor) on May 06, 2012 at 10:59 UTC
In perl, a string is not a character array. Some of the replies assume you meant one, others the other. An example would have been a big help to us.	[reply]
Re: simple question by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on May 06, 2012 at 14:19 UTC
Have a read about the `/g` modifier in regular expressions: it lets you apply a regex more than one time to the same string. Now you can, in a loop, collect all of the character-strings which match “one or more not-a-digit” and concatenate them into a new string.