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;
Two problems: 1. This doesn't remove just the whole words; it removes parts of words as well. i.e. "Analyzing Widgets" would become "alyzing Widgets" 2. It doesn't remove whitespace after the word, so "The Widget Primer" becomes " Widget Primer", which won't sort with the w's, due to the leading blank. Perhaps: $scalar =~ s/^(a|an|the)\s*\b//i; would work better. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
