Re: the end of a word

[Ionitor]

Well, if all you want to do is remove the last character of a string, regardless of what it is, then:

chop $directory;

will work. However, more is needed if you're looking to eliminate an indetermined amount of junk. A general regex to customize would be:

$directory =~ s/[^a-zA-Z]+$//;

This will remove any non-letters from the end of the variable (the ^ negates the [] character class). If there are other valid word letters, change the character class as needed.

[jaldhar]

[^a-z-A-Z] can be more succintly put as \W . (That's a capital W in case your font doesn't make it clear.)

--
જલધર

[Ovid]

That's a common misconception regarding \w and \W. The "word" characters (depending upon locale) are typically letters, underscores, and digits. Thus, the \W will not remove underscores or digits from the end.

$ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/[^a-zA-Z]+$//;print'
foobar

$ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/\W+$//;print'
foobar_

$ perl -e '$_="foobar9";s/\W+$//;print'
foobar9

Update: I pointed out a bug in your code only to realize a bug in mine :) My first example doesn't respect locale settings. I should be using POSIX character classes.

$ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/[[:^alpha:]]+$//;print'
foobar

Cheers,
Ovid

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