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

Monks,

my $out = substr("some/very/varied_length/string",-6);

is giving me "string" in $out.

But I want the other part "some/very/varied_length/" Here I am interested in a general code which works with the changes in length of "varied_length" of the above string.

Thanks.

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Re: accessing a part of a string
by Anonymous Monk on May 18, 2012 at 11:12 UTC
    If you are manipulating filesystem paths, use the Path::Class::Dir module and its dir_list method.

    If you are manipulating URIs, use the URI module and its path_segments method.

    If it is neither, simply use a regular expression that captures everything up to the last /. 

        'some/very/varied_length/string' =~ m|(.*/)|
    # expression returns ('some/very/varied_length/')

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Re: accessing a part of a string
by phenom (Chaplain) on May 18, 2012 at 11:11 UTC
    You want everything but a part of the string? You could play with this and alter it as needed: 
    my $string = 'some/very/varied_length/string';

my $subs = substr( $string, 0, length($string) - 6 );
say $subs;

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    Don't forget to add the OFFSET portion of substr.
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      substr( $string, 0, length($string) - 6 );

      can also be written as 

      substr( $string, 0, -6 );

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