Contributed by Anonymous Monk
on Apr 21, 2000 at 19:18 UTC
Q&A
> data formatting
Description:
I tried both of these, but neither one worked:
$user_name =~ s/[a-zA-Z0-9]//g;
$user_name !~ s/[a-zA-Z0-9]//g;
Answer: How do I keep anything other than alphanumeric out of a variable?
contributed by DrHyde
The following gets rid of non-alphanumerics and underscores:
$user_name =~ s/[\W_]//g;
The pattern [\W_] breaks down as follows:
- [...] any of the characters from the character class consisting of ...
- \W any "non-word" character ...
- _ or an underscore
However, instead of just silently cleaning data, I'd prefer to check
the string for undesirable characters and notify the user if it is bad,
so that they can fix it:
$user_name =~ /[\W_]/ and
warn "user name is bad\n"
| Answer: How do I keep anything other than alphanumeric out of a variable?
contributed by turnstep
As long as you are willing to concede that an underscore '_' is alphanumeric, you can use this:
$user_name =~ s/\W//g;
\w is shorthand for the character class [A-Za-z0-9_]
and \W is the inverse of that set, i.e. [^\w].
| Answer: How do I keep anything other than alphanumeric out of a variable?
contributed by btrott
Your regex says, "find the alphanumeric characters in $user_name, and replace them with nothing."
You want the opposite:
$user_name =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9]//g;
The ^ at the beginning of the character class inverts the set, i.e. "all things not in this character class".
| Answer: How do I keep anything other than alphanumeric out of a variable?
contributed by Roy Johnson
The right tool for character classes is tr///, not s///:
$user_name =~ tr/0-9a-zA-Z//dc;
(You can add the underscore character, or any others you like, of course.)
If you wanted the username to look like a valid Perl identifier (i.e., begin with a letter, then alphanumerics + underscores), you would then want to strip off the leading non-letters:
$user_name =~ s/^[^a-z]*//i;
|
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