Regular Expressions

[shaoen01]

Hi,

I am new to Perl and stumbled onto some regular expressions and not sure if i am right in interpreting it.

If my text is "My organization is great!"

Regular express used: s/z*/s/

Returned value will be --> My organisation is great!

Regular express used: s/z.*/s/

Returned value will be --> My organisstion is great!

Am i right? Do correct me if i am incorrect, thanks!

[Ganon11]

Hi,

I am new to Perl and stumbled onto some regular expressions and not sure if i am right in interpreting it.

If my text is "My organization is great!"

Regular express used: s/z*/s/

Returned value will be --> My organisation is great!

Incorrect. The regex will match 0 or more z's as soon as possible. In this case, the beginning of your string is 0 or more z's (0 z's), so it replaces the beginning of the string with an 's'.

Regular express used: s/z.*/s/

Returned value will be --> My organisstion is great!

Incorrect. This regex looks for a z, followed by any number of any character, and replaces it all with 1 z. So the resultant string would be "My organis"

Take a look at this simple perl script to examine this:

C:\Users\starkm3\Documents\Programming in Java>perl
my ($string1, $string2) = ("My organization is great!", "My organization is great!");
$string1 =~ s/z*/s/;
$string2 =~ s/z.*/s/;
print $string1, "\n", $string2, "\n";
^D
sMy organization is great!
My organis

[KevinADC]

Here was the answer to the OPs question:

$_ = "My organization is great!";
s/z.*/s/;
print;

All he/she had to do was try the code to find out what it does.