Basic Perl Regular Expressions

[Anonymous Monk]

I am new to Perl and I was hoping someone could explain to me how to divide up a string in order to work with each individual word. I have to use a program opposed to a script.

[dvergin]

This is just the sort of thing Perl is great at. Here's a bit to get you started.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $sentence = 'A sentence is just a bunch of words';

# Do the magic.
my @words = split /\s/, $sentence;

# That was it! Now show the results.
foreach my $word (@words) {
   print "$word\n";
}

And don't be shy about reading the docs that come with Perl. They are really quite good. The key one in this case (and for many beginner questions) is called 'perlfunc'.

Also, check out the Tutorials on this site. Very nice. There is one on Split and join.

[monkfish]

You might want to split on /\s+/ to be more robust. This will match white space of more than one character.

You could also split on /\b/ and then grep for word characters if you wanted a slightly different definition of a word. This would split words with hyphons and apostorphes which might or might not be what you want.

@words = grep (/\w/, split (/\b/, $foo));

-monkfish (The Fishy Monk)

[Zaxo]

Being magical, split " ", $string; is better yet. It trims leading and trailing space without leaving an empty slot in the array, as well as eating multiple spaces.

After Compline,
Zaxo

[Zecho]

perlre has the full details on how all of this stuff works