Thanks to all who replied - it is working fine now and I am now moving on to the next problem....all your help was appreciated and very usefull. I am sure I will be back here soon. Thanks Mark
________________________________ From: John W. Krahn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wed 20/09/2006 17:07 To: Perl Beginners Subject: Re: Newbie Question M K Scott wrote: > Hi, Hello, > I have tried that to no avail. I have also tried a simple match > of !~ m/(m|f){1}/ and even put in the code you suggested to read > !~ m/^(m|f){1}$/ but this still doesn't work properly. Input of > "d" or "T" will work to say it is incorrect and input of "m" or > "f" will be accepted but I was under the impression that the {1} > would limit it to only accept a single character while in practice > it still accepts "ff" and "mmm". Any ideas? The expression above seems to work for me: $ perl -le' for ( qw/ a aa aaa f ff fff m mm mmm / ) { print "$_: ", !/^(m|f){1}$/ ? "NOT " : "", "found"; } ' a: NOT found aa: NOT found aaa: NOT found f: found ff: NOT found fff: NOT found m: found mm: NOT found mmm: NOT found Note that /^(m|f){1}$/ could also be written as /^[mf]$/. > One further question though, an example question I am doing asks > for a text file to be read in and the number of digits to be > counted (ie 3 "1"'s, 6 "2"'s etc) and I can read input in and do > a 'getc' and pattern match that against a hash containing word > references to the numbers and then add one to a count but is > this the best way to do this? Using getc() is usually not the best way to do anything in Perl. John -- use Perl; program fulfillment -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
