On Tue, 24 Aug 2004, Jose Alves de Castro wrote:
On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 15:04, Tim McGeary wrote:I need to pull out articles "a", "an", and "the" from the beginning of title strings so that they sort properly in MySQL. What is the best way to accomplish that if I have a single $scalar with the whole title in it?
I would go with substitutions:
$scalar =~ s/^(?:a|an|the)//i;
Why not save the data for later by moving the article to the end?
$scalar =~ s/^(?:a|an|the)\s+(.*)/$2, $1/i;
That way, "A Tale of Two Cities" should become "Tale of Two Cities, A", and if you have to reconstitute the original title later, you haven't thrown anything away...
-- Chris Devers
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