Thanks for the response. Let me try to clear things up. The second solution will not work for me because the other parts of the filename will be unknown. The only part I know will always be in the filename is "test" (only an example).
So the full story is this: I need to look in a directory to see if a file with "test" in the name exists. If it does I need to move that file to a staging directory to be sftp'd out to a vendor. The manner in which I am doing that is to move the file named $filename (whose value is the result of the regex match) to the staging directory. Then sftp the $filename to the appropriate place. Does that help a bit? If not I apologize. Curt -----Original Message----- From: Timothy Johnson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 3:30 PM To: Curt Shaffer; beginners@perl.org Subject: RE: regular expression in a variable You're not being very clear what it is you're trying to do. I can see two ways of interpreting this. Regular expressions are mostly for checking the format of text to see if certain conditions "match". You might be asking how to do this: ######################## use strict; use warnings; opendir(DIR,".") or die("Couldn't open the current directory!\n"); my @files = readdir(DIR); foreach my $file(sort @files){ if($file =~ /(.*test.*)/i){ print "MATCH: $file\n"; } } ######################### You can also use the $1 variable to capture the last text string that matched the part of the regular expression between the parentheses. If, on the other hand, you're trying to generate file names, then regular expressions aren't what you're looking for. my $prefix = "123"; my $postfix = "456"; my $filename = $prefix."test".$postfix; print $filename."\n"; -----Original Message----- From: Curt Shaffer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 12:20 PM To: beginners@perl.org Subject: regular expression in a variable I need to set a variable to a filename where only 1 section of the file is static. For example: $filename =~ /test/; Where the following: Print "$filename\n"; Would produce: 123test456.txt -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
