[plug] A question for perl hackers

[Trevor Phillips]

I'm a bit late to this thread, but here's my $0.02...

On Thursday 22 August 2002 09:01, Anthony J. Breeds-Taurima wrote:
> 
> Just to show you anonther way:
>
> while (<>) {
> 	chop;              # get rid of the \n
> 	$_ =~ s/^\s*//;    # Remove leading whitespace
> 	# Now split the line on 1 or more whitespace chars
> 	# and place each part into a var.
> 	my ($size, $month, $day, $time, $name) = split(/\s+/);
>
> 	print "File : $name is $size bytes and ".
> 	      "was last touched at $time on $day/$month\n";
> }

I too would split on \s+ in this case. It nicely divides up the properties 
into an array.

> I a regex, you can wrap an expression in ()'s and it will remember and
> assign them to $1 -> $9 eg:
> /^(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)/

Or if you specifically want the first 5 characters as $1, you can use:
   /^(.{5})/

Similarly, the first five digits OR spaces:
   /^([\d\s]{5})/

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: Web Technical Administrator     -          T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                        -              Murdoch University | 
 >--------------------------------------------------------------------<
| On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of     /
| course. But mostly evil, on the whole.                             /
 \      -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)                          /