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Hi All,

Apologies in advance if this is a dumb question ("There are no stupid
questions, but there are loads of inquisitive idiots")...

I wanted a regular expression to seperate a filename from a full path
(UNIX). I came up with the following:

$target =~ m%(.+/)(.+)%;
$targetpath = $1;
$targetfile = $2;

Actually, I expected that not to work; but it does, apparently
perfectly. I thought it would fail because I thought the $1 portion of
the regexp would process $target until it found the leftmost '/' and
then stop, leaving everything else to the $2 part. Why am I wrong? Am I
just feeding it a particularly restrictive set of cases?

What regular expression could I use if I wanted to split a UNIX path
into the bottom level (that is, closest to root) directory and the rest
of the path?

Thanks for your indulgence.

Adam...

* schrieb:
>
> I wanted a regular expression to seperate a filename from a full path
> (UNIX). I came up with the following:
>
> $target =~ m%(.+/)(.+)%;
> $targetpath = $1;
> $targetfile = $2;
>
> Actually, I expected that not to work; but it does, apparently
> perfectly. I thought it would fail because I thought the $1 portion of
> the regexp would process $target until it found the leftmost '/' and
> then stop, leaving everything else to the $2 part. Why am I wrong?

In regular expressions ".+" is greedy. Hence the first part process
$target until the *rightmost* slash is found.

>
> What regular expression could I use if I wanted to split a UNIX path
> into the bottom level (that is, closest to root) directory and the rest
> of the path?

Avoid that greediness. Please read `perldoc perlre` for details.

$target =~ m%(.+?/)(.+)%;

regards,
fabian

wrote in news: oups.com:

> I wanted a regular expression to seperate a filename from a full path
> (UNIX).
> I came up with the following:
>
> $target =~ m%(.+/)(.+)%;
> $targetpath = $1;
> $targetfile = $2;

You do not need the full regex machinery to do accomplish such a
task. In addition, using File::Basename is more appropriate than
rolling your own in this case. See

<URL: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/msg/e8d8519b712c483b?dmode=source>

<URL: http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=unur+basename&scoring=d>

Sinan

--
A. Sinan Unur <>
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