so I'm doing some playing around, trying to learn up some perl, and I have a question.

what if I had two values, lets say "dog" and "dogs". If I'm looking just for "dog", how can I get it to not match "dogs".

something like this.

        if ( $hash{animal} =~ /^dog/ ) {
                if ( $hash{hair} =~ /^longhair/i ) {
                        print "singluar longhaired dog";
                        }
                else {
                        print "fail, you are stupid \n";
                        }
                }
        if ( $hash{animal} =~ /^dogs/i ) {
                if ( $hash{hair} =~ /^short/i ) {
                        print "bunch of short haired dogs. \n";
                        }
                else {
                        print "fail, you are stupid \n";
                        }
                }
        else {
                print "\nFAIL";
                }

7/24/2011 1:58:43 PM

/^dog$/

7/24/2011 2:05:57 PM

/^dog[^s]/

[^s] means exclude s

[Edited on July 24, 2011 at 2:08 PM. Reason : .]

7/24/2011 2:08:06 PM

excellent, both worked perfectly, but I'm going to use the $ since I have a few more of these to do and don't want to get dependent on the exclude box.

many thanks you 2.

7/24/2011 2:21:02 PM

/^fag(got)?[s]?$/

7/25/2011 8:24:42 AM

don't forget that /^dog$/ matches a string that is exactly 'dog'. It will not match in "I have a dog".

Also, /dog[^s]/ will not match 'dogs', but it will match 'doggies'. You might want to try word boundaries instead: /\bdog\b/

you might want to look in to 'look ahead' with regular expressions as well, if the library you are using supports them.

a good website for reference is http://www.regular-expressions.info

[Edited on July 25, 2011 at 3:50 PM. Reason : .]

7/25/2011 3:49:20 PM

ibtxkcd

7/25/2011 4:16:03 PM

/puss(y|ies)/

7/25/2011 8:41:13 PM