John W. Krahn wrote: > Bob Showalter wrote: > > 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" > > Actually it would become "nalyzing Widgets" because 'a' is the first > alternative. :-)
Smarty pants :~) My brain said "longest, leftmost", but the short-circuiting behavior is clearly documented in perldoc perlre. If the alternation is written as (an?|the), the "an" is matched. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
