[xesecre]

Hello, I have a question about IF statements for perl

I have this IF statement that looks for one asterisk

if $a eq "*";



I want an IF statement to look into the field $a and tell me if it even finds one or more asterisks in that field, how do I go about this?

Thanks
Johnny

[KevinADC]

xesecre, on 15 Oct, 2008 - 05:32 PM, said:

Hello, I have a question about IF statements for perl

I have this IF statement that looks for one asterisk

if $a eq "*";



I want an IF statement to look into the field $a and tell me if it even finds one or more asterisks in that field, how do I go about this?

Thanks
Johnny

One way is a regular expression:

$a = 'foo*foo*foo';

if ($a =~ /\*/) {
   print "Found * in $a";
}

Another way is the index() function:

$a = 'foo*foo*foo';

if (index($a,'*') > -1) {
   print "Found * in $a";
}

Regular expressions are for finding patterns in strings, index() is for finding substrings in strings. index() is better for your particular question, its more efficient but less powerful than a regular expression.

Your particular example is a very simple "find a character in a string" question, which is not a pattern, its a substring. A pattern would be something like "find 2 consecutive digits of any value followed by any lower-case alpha character" in a string:

if ($a =~ /\d\d[a-z]/) {
   print "found it";
}

This post has been edited by KevinADC: 16 October 2008 - 12:03 AM