note dbwiz <p>Please, test your code. </p> <p><code>\d*</code> will match 0 (ZERO) or more digits.</p> <p>Thus, it will happily match an empty string at the beginning of a string like "abc123" and return a 0 length string. Try it.</p> <p>The right expression to use in this case is <code>\d+</code>.</p> <p>Moreover, a capturing regular expression should always be used with a test:</p> <code> my $num; my $variable = "abc123"; if ( $variable =~ /(\d+)/) { $num = $1; } </code> 455137 455139