Thanks to the people who promptly replied.
I have two quick follow-up questions:
1) What does "s/\s*$/\./" do? (see email below)
It effectively puts a period at the end of the string, while deleting any extra spaces at the end.
2) What are the differences between:
$string .= '.' unless $string =~ /[$!.]+$/; (suggested in another email)
literally: append (.=) a period to $string if $string ends with one or more of dollar ($), exclamation (!), or period (.).
and
$title =~ s/\s*$/\./ unless $title =~ /[!?.]\s*$/;
literally: replace zero or more spaces just before the end of $title, along with the psuedo end of line token ($) with a period Unless $title ends with a single exclamation (!), question (?), or a period (.) and zero or more spaces.
Note the escape in the substitution part is unnecessary:
$title =~ s/\s*$/./
is equivelant. In the substitution part, only escape characters that you would escape in a double quoted string - generally.
#####
Assuming the string is clean (i.e. no extra spaces), appending the period is faster than a substituion regex, so I'd use:
$string .= '.'
to add the period.
For checking puctuation you can use the [:punct:] character class
$string =~ /[[:punct:]]$/
will detect punctuation at the end of the string, as will:
substr( $string, -1 ) =~ /[[:punct:]]/
So any of the following will give you the results you want:
unless ( $string =~ /[[:punct:]]$/ ) {
$string .= '.';
}unless ( substr( $string, -1 ) =~ /[[:punct:]]/ ) {
$string .= '.';
}or their respective abbreviated forms:
$string .= '.' unless $string =~ /[[:punct:]]$/;
$string .= '.' unless substr( $string, -1 ) =~ /[[:punct:]]/;
Hmm, that's probably more than you wanted...
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