help in matching

[uva]

$_='process1';
if (/-process/)
{
print "success";
}

============================================================ in the above code what does the hypen resembles.....i read that is range operator for regular expression...i tried but i could not...please help me.

[Fletch]

The '-' character is for ranges, but only inside a character class. /[a-d]/ would match one single character 'a', 'b', 'c', or 'd'. /a-d/ matches an 'a' followed by a '-' followed by a 'd'. Your regex would match a dash followed by 'process' (i.e. '-process'); since your sample data does not contain a dash followed by 'process' the match fails.

[mickeyn]

in this case the RE just looks for the character '-' which does not precede 'process'.
to be used as range operator it should be placed within a character class.

Enjoy, Mickey

[svenXY]

Hi,
range operator here means that e.g. [a-z] means one character in the range of a-z.
If you want your example to match, just omit the hyphen and it will match.

It is however not a good idea to set $_ as it is a magic variable ( see perlvar).
Regards,
svenXY

[MCS]

What you are currently doing is searching for "-process" in this $_ (magic operator) which you have assigned the value 'process1.' Running this yields nothing because '-process' is not in 'process1.' A better approach would be:

my $string = 'process1';
if ($string =~ /process/) 
{
    print "success";
}

This searches $string for the text "process." (for more information on these matches read up on regular expressions)

[uva]

thanks for your replies friends..... i understood..