On Tue, 24 Aug 2004, Errin Larsen wrote:
Perhaps:
$scalar =~ s/^(a|an|the)\s*\b//i;
would work better.
<<SNIP>>
Is this capturing into $1 the a|an|the (yes) and the rest of the title into $2 (no?).
There is only one pair of parentheses, so only $1 is captured.
I still think it's prudent to capture everything else as $2, and then substitute such that the article captured in $1 is now the suffix:
$scalar =~ s/^(a|an|the)\s*\b(.*)/$2, $1/i;
Which turns "A Hard Day's Night" into "Hard Day's Night, A". If you ever need the original string back -- the person who started this thread was trying to get this info into a MySQL database in such a way that it would sort by the first significant word and not the article that precedes it -- then you can reverse the change with something like:
$scalar =~ s/(.*), \b(a|an|the)$/$2 $1/i;
and "Hard Day's Night, A" should once again be "A Hard Day's Night".
After doing so, will it reverse the two ( i.e. s/^(a|an|the)\s+(.*)\b/$2, $1/i )?
Your version should; the one above won't.
Also, what is the "\b"?
Word boundary.
it seems that the trailing "i" is for ignoring case; is that correct?
Yes.
Just need some help with RE!!
`perldoc perlre`
Or the wonderful -- really! -- book, _Mastering Regular Expressions_.
-- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/
np: 'Colt 45'
by
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