I perfectly know that dbwiz gave a good advice, as you can note in Re^5: what is the best way to seperate the digits and strings from variable ?. I only argued upon his jumping to conclusions pointing out that he was working under assumptions that were different from mine, and he basically made my very same error: thinking in a restricted context.

And, jokes apart, I'm not fooling myself (even if you may think I'm trying to fool you); I'd like to see a single post of mine in which I was even slightly erroneous without taking my responsabilities. If you find, please point me out.

If you read my answer carefully, you'd see that:

• I thought about what I was writing, maybe for the very single time;
• dbwiz suggestion was based upon the assumption that the OP wanted to extract a number. I was answering to a question that dealt with a string. We can argue about that at will, but the fact remains that we were talking about different things and that my answer applied to what I was talking about. Incidentally, the OP language seems to be biased towards my interpretation, at least in my understanding - but here I'm repeating myself.

On with the rest:

Assigning $1 without testing is almost a capital sin in Regex parlance

This is like saying that I shouldn't use symbolic references. Why not, if they're in a controlled environment? As dbwiz correctly noted, my regex ALWAYS matches, because it matches the empty string. So, why should I check if $1 is set if I already know that it's set? Just because otherwise I'm committing a capital sin?

Your initial code would pass a test against the only example provided by the OP

I'm happy that you noticed, because I clearly stated that the question was not clear. On the other side, I completely disagree on the following consideration:

but it would fail in many other cases.

Of which you provide no single example. And I can tell you why: you continue to assume that you have to extract numbers, and I continue to say that we could need digits. What if he wanted to swap the digit and alpha parts? Would you accept to move files:

0001-ciccio.txt
001-ciccio.txt
01-ciccio.txt
[download]

all to ciccio-1.txt?

To definitively conclude this mess:

• I hereby state that I thank dbwiz for his pointing out that I'm a moron who'd better think about all possible context in which his answers could be used
• I'm stopping this thread here. Sorry, I don't like it any more and I like much less to repeat myself. I accepts my limits in expressing myself, unluckily I'm Italian and English is not my primary language.
• I ask pardon to all who've been bored by my posts in this thread.
• I invite all, me first, to consider that there can be other points of view, and that the discussion should be open enough to benefit from them all without excluding any a-priori.

Cheers

Cin-cin with our beer pints! (or whatever you like to drink)

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