the end of a word

[Sara]

Hello monks ,,, how can I subtract or actually clean the end of a word.. for example if i have this variable

$directory = home] ;

so I want to get rid of the "]" at the end of home so it should look like this :

$directory = home;

thanks :)

[arturo]

A lot depends on what you want to "clean." For the specific case you mention (with all those naughty barewords... put on some quotes, or you'll catch a horrible illness), you might be able to employ the builtin character class \w ("word" characters) or its negation, \W (not "word" characters). The perldoc perlre can help a lot here. Since I can't tell exactly what you're trying to fix, I'll assume you want to get rid of any non-word characters at the end of the string, for which

$directory =~ s/\W+$//;

ought to suffice. The $ anchors the match to the end of the string, and "\W+" matches "one or more non-word characters". It then replaces any such pattern found with nothing.

HTH

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of integrity -- F. Nietzsche

[Sara]

thank you all

[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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[Ovid]

I'm afraid you'll have to provide a better explanation for "subtract or actually clean the end of a word". One solution (which may not fit, depending upon your needs), would be to use a word boundary (\b) with a regex.

$ perl -e '($_)="foobar]"=~/(f.*?)\b/;print'
foobar

Cheers,
Ovid

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[ichimunki]

perldoc -f chop

for when you know you don't want the last letter

perldoc -f tr

for when you want to get rid of certain characters no matter where they appear, example: $directory =~ tr/\]//

perldoc perlre

for when you need to do some fancy reg ex substitution stuff to get at real specific stuff like remove a specific character at the end of a string, example: $directory =~ s/\]$//

[dbalagi2]

$directory =~ s/. \t*\;$/ \;/; the space and the tabs need to be enclosed in square braces . not able to get the formatting rigth