Well, what I said was that 
m/.{$width}/

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could be better written with substr, and still be readable. I have seen from replies to my post that unpack is better yet. I just made the $text =~ /\.txt$/ regex example up as I was writing the post, so it my not be the best, but the point I wanted to get at is if you don't need to match the whole string, then don't. For example: 
$text =~ m/.*$endPat$/

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can be better written (and still readable) as: 
$text =~ m/$endPat$/

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And as you have pointed out, the above code can be written this way (much less readable, I wouldn't recomend using this) 
substr($text,0-length($endPat)) eq $endPat

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On a last note, I never said it was a mistake not to use subst(), I just wanted to point out that in some cases it is better than using a regular expression.

The 15 year old, freshman programmer,
Stephen Rawls

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Regex Misuse by srawls
in thread Regex Misuse by srawls

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