perl newbie: how to extract an unknown word from a string - Shell Programming and Scripting

wolwy_pete · #1 (**permalink**) 03-22-2008

hi,
im quite new to perl regexp. i have a problem where i want to extract a word from a given string. but the word is unknown, only fact is that it appears as the second word in the string.

Eg.
input string(s) :
char var1 = 'A';
int var2 = 10;
char *ptr;

and what i want to do is to get the variable name (var1, var2, ptr ..etc.) from an above like string.
can we use something like (w+) to match a whole word.

thankx in advance.
wolwy.

fpmurphy · #2 (**permalink**) 03-22-2008

An easier way might be to use the split function. The following example shows you how to use the split function to extract words from a string.

Code:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

my $str = "The quick brown box";

my @words = split(' ', $str);

foreach my $word (@words) {
    print "$word\n";
}

print "All words: @words\n";
print "Second word: @words[1]\n";

exit 0;

jim mcnamara · #3 (**permalink**) 03-22-2008

small typo in the above

Code:

print "Second word: @words[1]\n";
# should be
print "Second word: $words[1]\n";

wolwy_pete · #4 (**permalink**) 03-23-2008

thankx very much guys,
it worked, the split function was quite useful.

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