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sw

Member

Registered: 2009-05-11

Posts: 6

perl regex help

$element = "-rw-rw-rw-   1 asdfs       itsupp             4 Apr 14 23:51 /tmp/xyz.out";

I've got many strings, similar to the above, and I just need to extract the '/tmp/xyz.out' part into a new variable. I know this would be easy to do by just by calling cut via a system command, but I would prefer to do it completely in perl and I guess using regex, which I'm sure is pretty easy too, but I don't know how. Can anyone help?

Cheers,

sw

Last edited by sw (2009-05-11 09:19:08)

Xyne

Administrator/PM

Registered: 2008-08-03

Posts: 6,965

Website

Re: perl regex help

if ($element =~ /(\S+)$/)
{
  my $path = $1;
}

The regex will grab all non-whitespace characters at the end of $element. If there's a chance that there could be trailing whitespace, use "/(\S+)\s*$/" instead.

More info on perl regexes:
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html

Last edited by Xyne (2009-05-11 09:30:24)

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sw

Member

Registered: 2009-05-11

Posts: 6

Re: perl regex help

Thanks for you answer, it works perfectly. I have been trying to form the answer myself, but couldn't quite get my head around it, now you have shown me that it makes complete sense. Thanks for the links too!

sw

Daenyth

Forum Fellow

From: Boston, MA

Registered: 2008-02-24

Posts: 1,244

Re: perl regex help

You could also use split() for this, it might be a little faster than a regex.

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