One way is that you can use eq instead of =~. If there is a reason you can't use eq then you can use /^name$/. That will cause it only to match the string name. BTW, eq does an exact string match while =~ does a pattern match.
To illustrate the difference, consider the following lines print "1" if "merry christmas" eq "chris"; print "2" if "merry christmas" =~ /chris/; print "3" if "merry christmas" =~ /^chris$/; This will print out 2, but not 1 or 3. print "1" if "chris" eq "chris"; print "2" if "chris" =~ /chris/; print "3" if "chris" =~ /^chris$/; This will print out 123. You can look at perldoc perlre for regular expression help and perldoc perlop for help on eq and its relatives. Hope this helps! Tanton -----Original Message----- From: HANSON To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 11/9/2001 5:46 PM Subject: basic pattern matching Hi gurus! I am traversing a multidimensional hash searching for a value and trying to delete it. However, I am ending up deleting the wrong one. The value I'm looking for is /name/. There is also a value of /name1/ in the hash. When I use =~/name/ it deletes the name1 value somehow. Is there a way I can be very specific and keep it from deleting the name1 value? Thanks! -mark -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
