On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 15:16, Tim McGeary 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; > > So that I am understanding this process, what does each part mean? I > assume that the ^ means beginning of the variable... is that correct? > What about "(?:" ?
The ^ means the beginning of the string in $scalar, indeed. As for the rest, I decided to group "a", "an" and "the" with brackets, or otherwise the regex would have been /^a|^an|^the/ Regarding the :? , that's just so variable $1 doesn't end up with whatever was removed, as there was no need for that. Search for "Non-capturing groupings" under perldoc perlretut, if you need more information > tyia, > Tim HTH, :-) jac -- José Alves de Castro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://natura.di.uminho.pt/~jac
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