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I am having some problem with the substitution operation. This is what
I am trying to do:

Get a directory path from the user and also the search string in the
path and remove the string from the path.

Input String: c:\ashok\temp\perl
Search String: c:\ashok

So the output should be temp\perl.

The Program I wrote looks like this:

$input = <STDIN>;
$search = <STDIN>;

$input =~ s/$search//;
print $input;

But this does not work. It looks like there is some confusion with the
special characters :, \ .
Can somebody tell me what's wrong and how do I fix this?

Thanks,
Ashok.

Ashok wrote:
> I am having some problem with the substitution operation. This is what
> I am trying to do:
>
> Get a directory path from the user and also the search string in the
> path and remove the string from the path.
>
> Input String: c:\ashok\temp\perl
> Search String: c:\ashok
>
> So the output should be temp\perl.

I suppose you mean \temp\perl - or did I miss a step?

> The Program I wrote looks like this:
>
> $input = <STDIN>;
> $search = <STDIN>;
>
> $input =~ s/$search//;
> print $input;
>
> But this does not work. It looks like there is some confusion with the
> special characters :, \ .

Do not just guess which characters are special in a Perl pattern. Look
it up in "perldoc perlre". There you can also read about how to quote
pattern metacharacters when needed.

> Can somebody tell me what's wrong and how do I fix this?

Besides the unquoted backslash, $search includes an EOL character.
Best fixed with the chomp() function.

--
Gunnar Hjalmarsson
Email: http://www.gunnar.cc/cgi-bin/contact.pl