In Perl, how do you find the index of the last digit in a string?
Example: Hello123xyz index of last digit is 7
A RE to match the last digit in the string and the #- variable to get the index of the start of the match:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use feature qw/say/;
sub last_digit_index($) {
if ($_[0] =~ /\d\D*\z/) {
return $-[0];
} else {
return -1;
}
}
say last_digit_index("Hello123xyz"); # 7
I'd probably use the pos function here. Match with /g and the Perl remembers where the match left off. The next global match on that string will start where the last match left off, so isolate this in a sub or block to avoid weird effects on subsequent matches on the same variable.
Since the position counts from 0, the next position will be one greater than the 1-based position of the final digit. You decide if you want to subtract 1 or not:
use v5.10;
say last_digit_pos('Hello123xyz');
sub last_digit_pos {
my( $string ) = #_;
$string =~ m/^.*\d/sg;
return pos($string); # 6
}
And, if the string doesn't match, pos doesn't return a defined value.
Can also leverage List::MoreUtils::last_index
use List::MoreUtils qw(last_index);
my $last_digit_index = last_index { /[0-9]/ } split '', $string;
I find this simple: break the string into a list of characters with a typical use of split, and use a library to find the last one which is a digit, via a trivial regex.
Note that this is "expensive" as it creates a scalar for each character and runs regex multiple times. So if efficiency matters -- if this is done on an absolutely gigantic string, or many many many times on smaller strings -- then better seek other approaches, or at least benchmark it before deciding on it. (Note, that would have to be really a lot of strings to see degraded efficiency.)
Related
$text = "I like apples more than oranges\n";
#words = split /” “/, $text;
foreach (#words) [1..] {
if $words "AEIOUaeiou";
$words =~ tr/A E I O U a e i o u//d;
}
print "$words\n";
"I like apples more than oranges" will become "I lk appls mr thn orngs". "I" in "I", "a" in "appls" and "o" in "orngs" will stay because they are the first letter in the word.
This is my research assignment as a first year student. I am allowed to ask questions and later cite them. Please don't be mean.
I know you say you are not allowed to use a regex, but for everyone else that shows up here I'll show the use of proper tools. But, then I'll do something just as useful with tr///.
One of the tricks of programming (and mathematics) decomposing what look like hard problems into easier problems, especially if you already have solutions for the easy problems. (Read about Parnas decomposition, for example).
So, the question is "How can I remove all the vowels unless they are in word beginnings?" (after I made your title a bit shorter). This led the answers to think about words, so they split up the input, did some work to ensure they weren't working on the first character, and then reassembled the result.
But, another way to frame the problem is "How do I remove all the vowels that come after another letter?". The only letter that doesn't come after another letter is the first letter of a word.
The regex for a vowel that comes after another letter is simple (but I'll stick to ASCII here, although it is just as simple for any Unicode letter):
[a-z][aeiou]
That only matches when there is a vowel after the first letter. Now you want to replace all of those with nothing. Use the substitution operator, s///. The /g flag makes all global substitutions and the /i makes it case insensitive:
s/[a-z][aeiou]//gi;
But, there's a problem. It also replaces that leading letter. That's easy enough to fix. The \K in a substitution says to ignore the part of the pattern before it in the replacement. Anything before the \K is not replaced. So, this only replaces the vowels:
s/[a-z]\K[aeiou]//gi;
But, maybe there are vowels next to each other, so throw in the + quantifier for "one or more" of the preceding item:
s/[a-z]\K[aeiou]+//gi;
You don't need to care about words at all.
Some other ways
Saying that a letter must follow another letter has a special zero-width assertion: the non-word boundary, \B (although that also counts digits and underscore as "letters"):
s/\B[aeiou]+//gi;
The \K was introduced v5.10 and was really a nifty trick to have a variable-width lookbehind. But, the lookbehind here is fixed width: it's one character:
s/(?<=[a-z])[aeiou]+//gi;
But, caring about words
Suppose you need to handle each word separately, for some other requirement. It looks like you've mixed a little Python-ish sort of code, and it would be nice if Perl could do that :). The problem doesn't change that much because you can do the same thing for each individual word.
foreach my $word ( split /\s+/, $x ) {
.... # same thing for each word
}
But, here's an interesting twist? How do you put it all back together? The other solutions just use a single space assuming that's the separator. Maybe there should be two spaces, or tabs, or whatever. The split has a special "separator retention mode" that can keep whatever was between the pieces. When you have captures in the split pattern, those capture values are part of the output list:
my #words_and_separators = split /(\s+)/, $x;
Since you know that none of the separators will have vowels, you can make substitutions on them knowing they won't change. This means you can treat them just like the words (that is, there is no special case, which is another thing to think about as you decompose problems). To get your final string with the original spacing, join on the empty string:
my $ending_string = join '', #words_and_separators;
So, here's how that might all look put together. I'll add the /r flag on the substitution so it returns the modified copy instead of working on the original (don't modify the control variable!):
my #words;
foreach my $word ( split /(\s+)/, $x ) {
push #words, $word =~ s/\B[aeiou]+//gr;
}
my $ending_string = join '', #words;
But, that foreach is a bit annoying. This list pipeline is the same, and it's easier to read these bottom to top. Each thing produces a list that flows into the thing above it. This is how I'd probably express it in real code:
my $ending_string =
join '',
map { s/\B[aeiou]+//gr } # each item is in $_
split /(\s+)/, $x;
Now, here's the grand finale. What if we didn't split thing up on whitespace but on whitespace and the first letter of each word? With separator retention mode we know that we only have to affect every other item, so we count them as we do the map:
my $n = 0;
my $ending_string =
join '',
map { ++$n % 2 ? tr/aeiouAEIOU//dr : $_ }
split /((?:^|\s+)[a-z])/i, $x;
But, I wouldn't write this technique in this way because someone would ultimately find me and exact their revenge. Instead, that foreach I found annoying before may soothe the angry masses:
my $n = 0;
foreach ( split /((?:^|\s+)[a-z])/i, $x ) {
print ++$n % 2 ? tr/aeiouAEIOU//dr : $_;
}
This now remembers the actual separators from the original string and leaves alone the first character of the "word" because it's not in the element we will modify.
The code in the foreach doesn't need to use the conditional operator, ?: or some of the other features. The important part is skipping every other element. That split pattern is a bit of a puzzler if you haven't seen it before, but that's what you get with those sorts of requirements. I think modifying a portion of the substring is just as likely to trip up people on a first read.
I mean, if they are going to make you do it the wrong way in the homework, strike back with something that will take up a bit of their time. :)
Oh, this is fun
I had another idea, because tr/// has another task beyond transliteration. It also counts. Because it returns the number of replacements, if you replace anything with itself, you get a count of the occurrences of that thing. You can count vowels, for instance:
my $has_vowels = $string =~ tr/aeiou/aeiou/; # counts vowels
But, with a string of one letter, that means you have a way to tell if it is a vowel:
my $is_vowel = substr( $string, $i, 1 ) =~ tr/aeiou/aeiou/;
You also can know things about the previous character:
my $is_letter = substr( $string, $i - 1, 1 ) =~ tr/a-zA-Z/a-zA-Z/;
Put that together and you can look at any position and know if it's a vowel that follows a letter. If so, you skip that letter. Otherwise, you add that letter to the output:
use v5.10;
$x = "I like apples more than oranges oooooranges\n";
my $output = substr $x, 0, 1; # avoid the -1 trap (end of string!)
for( my $i = 1; $i < length $x; $i++ ) {
if( substr( $x, $i, 1 ) =~ tr/aeiou/aeiou/ ) { # is a vowel
next if substr( $x, $i - 1, 1 ) =~ tr/a-zA-Z/a-zA-Z/;
}
$output .= substr $x, $i, 1;
}
say $output;
This has the fun consequence of using the recommended operator but completely bypassing the intent. But, this is a proper and intended use of tr///.
It appears that you need to put a little more effort into learning Perl before taking on challenges like this. Your example contains a lot of code that simply isn't valid Perl.
$x = "I like apples more than oranges\n"; #the original sentence
foreach $i in #x[1..] {
You assign your text to the scalar variable $x, but then try to use the array variable #x. In Perl, these are two completely separate variables that have no connection whatsoever. Also, in Perl, the range operator (..) needs values at both ends.
If you had an array called #x (and you don't, you have a scalar) then you could do what you're trying to do here with foreach $i (#x)
if $i "AEIOUaeiou";
I'm not sure what you're trying to do here. I guess the nearest useful Perl expression I can see would be something like:
if ($i =~ /^[AEIOUaeiou]$/)
Which would test if $i is a vowel. But that's a regex, so you're not allowed to use it.
Obviously, I'd solve this problem with a regex, but as those are banned, I've reached for some slightly more obscure Perl features in my code below (that's so your teacher won't believe this is your solution if you just cut and paste it):
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';
my $text = "I like apples more than oranges\n";
# Split the string into an array of words
my #words = split /\s+/, $text;
# For each word...
for (#words) {
# Get a substring that omits the first character
# and use tr/// to remove vowels from that substring
substr($_, 1) =~ tr/AEIOUaeiou//d;
}
# Join the array back together
$text = join ' ', #words;
say $text;
Update: Oh, and notice that I've used tr/AEIUOaeiou//d where you have tr/A E I O U a e i o u//d. It probably won't make any difference here (depending on your approach - but you'll probably be applying it to strings that don't contain spaces) but it's good practice to only include the characters that you want to remove.
We can go over the input string from the end and remove any vowel that's not preceded by a space. We go from right to left so we don't have to adjust the position after each deletion. We don't need to check the very first letter, it shouldn't be ever removed. To remove a vowel, we can use tr///d on the substr of the original string.
for my $i (reverse 1 .. length $x) {
substr($x, $i, 1) =~ tr/aeiouAEIOU//d
if substr($x, $i - 1, 1) ne ' ';
}
Firstly your if statement is wrong.
Secondly this is not a Perl code.
Here is a piece of code that will work, but there is a better way to do it
my $x = "I like apples more than oranges\n";
my $new = "";
my #arr;
foreach my $word (split(' ', $x)) {
#arr = split('', $word);
foreach (my $i; $i<scalar #arr; $i++){
if ($i == 0){
$new .= $arr[$i];
}
elsif (index("AEIOUaeiou", $arr[$i]) == -1) {
$new .= $arr[$i];
}
}
$new .= " ";
}
print "$new\n";
Here I am splitting the string in order to get an array, then I am checking if the given char is a vowel, if it's not, I am appending it to a new string.
Always include
use strict;
use warnings;
on top of your code.
Clearly this is an exercise in lvalues. Obviously. Indubitably!
#!/usr/bin/env perl
# any old perl will do
use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;
# This is not idomatic nor fantastic code. Idiotastic?
$_='I am yclept Azure-Orange, queueing to close a query. How are YOU?';
# My little paws typed "local pos" and got
# "Useless localization of match position" :(
# so a busy $b keeps/restores that value
while (/\b./g) {
substr($_,$b=pos,/\b/g && -$b+pos)
# Suggestion to use tr is poetic, not pragmatic,
# ~ tr is sometimes y and y is sometimes a vowel
=~ y/aeiouAEIOU//d;
pos=$b;
}
say
# "say" is the last word.
Was there an embargo against using s/// substitution, or against using all regex? For some reason I thought matching was OK, just not substitution. If matches are OK, I have an idea that "improves" upon this by removing $b through pattern matching side effects. Will see if it pans out. If not, should be pretty easy to replace /\b/ and pos with index and variables, though the definition of word boundary over-simplifies in that case.
(edit) here it is a little more legible with nary a regex
my $text="YO you are the one! The-only-person- asking about double spaces.
Unfortunate about newlines...";
for (my $end=length $text;
$end > 0 && (my $start = rindex $text,' ',$end);
$end = $start-1) {
# y is a beautiful letter, using it for vowels is poetry.
substr($text,2+$start,$end-$start) =~ y/aeiouUOIEA//d;
}
say $text;
Maybe more devious minds will succeed with vec, unpack, open, fork?
You can learn about some of these techniques via
perldoc -f substr
perldoc -f pos
perldoc re
As for my own implementer notes, the least important thing is ending without punctuation so nothing can go after
I'm trying to truncate a string in a select input option using perl if it is longer than a set value, though i can't get it to work correctly.
my $value = defined $option->{value} ? $option->{value} : '';
my $maxValueLength = 50;
if ($value.length > $maxValueLength) {
$value = substr $value, 0, $maxValueLength + '...';
}
Another option is regex
$string =~ s/.{$maxLength}\K.*/.../;
It matches any character (.) given number of times ({N}, here $maxLength), what is the first $maxLength characters in $string; then \K makes it "forget" all previous matches so those won't get replaced later. The rest of the string that is matched is then replaced by ...
See Lookaround assertions in perlre for \K.
This does start the regex engine for a simple task but it doesn't need any conditionals -- if the string is shorter than the maximum length the regex won't match and nothing happens.
Your code has several syntax errors. Turn on use strict and use warnings if you don't have it, and then read the error messages it tells you about. This is a bit tricky because of Perl's very complex syntax (see also Damian Conway's keynote from the 2020 Perl and Raku Conference), but it boils down to these:
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at line 7
Argument "..." isn't numeric in addition (+) at line 8
I've used the following adaption of your code to produce these
use strict;
use warnings;
my $value = '1234567890' x 10;
my $maxValueLength = 50;
if ( $value.length > $maxValueLength ) {
$value = substr $value, 0, $maxValueLength + '...';
}
print $value;
Now let's see what they mean.
The . operator in Perl is a concatenation. You cannot use it to call methods, and length is not a method on a string. Perl thinks you are using the built-in length (a function, not a method) without an argument, which makes it default to $_. Most built-ins do this, to make one-liners shorter. But $_ is not defined. Now the . tries to concatenate the length of undef to $value. And using undef in a string operation leads to this warning.
The correct way of doing this is length $value (or with parentheses if you prefer them, length($value)).
The + operator is not concatenation (we just learned that the . is). It's a numerical addition. Perl is pretty good at converting between strings and numbers as there aren't really any types, so saying 1 + "5" would give you 6 without problems, but it cannot do that for a couple of dots in a string. Hence it complains about a non-number value in an addition.
You want the substring with a given length, and then you want to attach the three dots. Because of associativity (or stickyness) of operators you will need to use parentheses () for your substr call.
$value = substr($value, 0, $maxValueLength) . '...';
To find a length of the string use length(STRING)
Here is the code snippet how you can modify the script.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature qw(say);
my $string = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
say "length of original string is:".length($string);
my $value = defined $string ? $string : '';
my $maxValueLength = 50;
if (length($value) > $maxValueLength) {
$value = substr $value, 0, $maxValueLength;
say "value:$value";
say "value's length:".length($value);
}
Output:
length of original string is:80
value:abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw
value's length:50
I have a function whose aim is to extract a substring found between two delimiters. I would use regex but in this case I have explicit instructions not to use them.
I had a simpler and more elegant solution which was just one line but I cannot for the life of me remember or find it.
sub findBetween {
my ($theString,$delimiter1,$delimiter2) = (#_);
my $tmp = substr($theString, index($theString,$delimiter1)+length($delimiter1));
$tmp = substr($tmp, 0, index($tmp,$delimiter2));
return $tmp;}
Thank you for taking a look at this issue, I am aware it is very basic and somewhat redundant. What I need is a simpler solution involving perl basic functions and no regex.
You can use two index() calls to locate both delimiters and use indexes to extract string between them,
sub findBetween {
my ($theString,$delimiter1,$delimiter2) = #_;
my $i1 = index($theString, $delimiter1, 0) + length($delimiter1);
my $i2 = index($theString, $delimiter2, $i1);
return substr($theString, $i1, $i2-$i1);
}
print findBetween("111--2222~~333", "--", "~~"), "\n";
output
2222
I would simply use index
use strict;
use warnings;
my $string = "hello my world";
my $substr = "my";
if (index($string, $substr) != -1) {
print "$substr found in $string";
}
Extract from perldoc
• index STR,SUBSTR,POSITION
• index STR,SUBSTR
The index function searches for one string within another, but without the wildcard-like behavior of a full regular-expression pattern match. It returns the position of the first occurrence of SUBSTR in STR at or after POSITION. If POSITION is omitted, starts searching from the beginning of the string. POSITION before the beginning of the string or after its end is treated as if it were the beginning or the end, respectively. POSITION and the return value are based at zero. If the substring is not found, index returns -1.
I'm trying to find the index of white space in a string in Perl.
For example, if I have the string
stuff/more stuffhere
I'd like to select the word "more" with a substring method. I can find the index of "/" but haven't figured out how to find the index of white space. The length of the substring I'm trying to select will vary, so I can't hard code the index. There will only be one white space in the string (other than those after the end of the string).
Also, if anybody has any better ideas of how to do this, I'd appreciate hearing them. I'm fairly new to programming so I'm open to advice. Thanks.
Just use index:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use feature qw{ say };
my $string = 'stuff/more stuffhere';
my $index_of_slash = index $string, '/';
my $index_of_space = index $string, ' ';
say "Between $index_of_slash and $index_of_space.";
The output is
Between 5 and 10.
Which is correct:
0 1
01234567890123456789
stuff/more stuffhere
If by "whitespace" you also mean tabs or whatever, you can use a regular expression match and the special variables #- and #+:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use feature qw{ say };
my $string = "stuff/more\tstuffhere";
if ($string =~ m{/.*(?=\s)}) {
say "Between $-[0] and $+[0]";
}
The (?=\s) means is followed by a whitespace character, but the character itself is not part of the match, so you don't need to do any maths on the returned values.
As you stated, you want to select the word between the first /
and the first space following it.
If this is the case, you maybe don't need any index (you need just
the word).
A perfect tool to find something in a text is regex.
Look at the following code:
$txt = 'stuff/more stuffxx here';
if ($txt =~ /\/(.+?) /) {
print "Match: $1.\n";
}
The regex used tries to match:
a slash,
a non-empty sequence of any chars (note ? - reluctant
version), enclosed in a capturing group,
a space.
So after the match $1 contains what was captured by the first
capturing group, i.e. "your" word.
But if for any reason you were interested in starting and ending
offsets to this word, you can read them from $-[1]
and $+[1] (starting / ending indices of the first capturing group).
The arrays #- (#LAST_MATCH_START) and #+ (#LAST_MATCH_END) give offsets of the start and end of last successful submatches. See Regex related variables in perlvar.
You can capture your real target, and then read off the offset right after it with $+[0]
#+
This array holds the offsets of the ends of the last successful submatches in the currently active dynamic scope. $+[0] is the offset into the string of the end of the entire match. This is the same value as what the pos function returns when called on the variable that was matched against.
Example
my $str = 'target and target with spaces';
while ($str =~ /(target)\s/g)
{
say "Position after match: $+[0]"
}
prints
Position after match: 7
Position after match: 18
These are positions right after 'target', so of spaces that come after it.
Or you can capture \s instead and use $-[1] + 1 (first position of the match, the space).
You can use
my $str = "stuff/more stuffhere";
if ($str =~ m{/\K\S+}) {
... substr($str, $-[0], $+[0] - $-[0]) ...
}
But why substr? That's very weird there. Maybe if you told us what you actually wanted to do, we could provide a better alternatives. Here are three cases:
Data extraction:
my $str = "stuff/more stuffhere";
if ( my ($word) = $str =~ m{/(\S+)} ) {
say $word; # more
}
Data replacement:
my $str = "stuff/more stuffhere";
$str =~ s{/\K\S+}{REPLACED};
say $str; # stuff/REPLACED stuffhere
Data replacement (dynamic):
my $str = "stuff/more stuffhere";
$str =~ s{/\K(\S+)}{ uc($1) }e;
say $str; # stuff/MORE stuffhere
I'm trying to use an array and a loop to print out the following (basically for each letter of the alphabet, print each letter of the alphabet after it and then move on to the next letter). I'm new to perl, anyone have any quick words of :
aa
ab
ac
ad
...
ba
bb
bc
bd
...
ca
cb
...
Currently I have this, but it only prints a single character alphabet...
#arr = ("a","b","c","d","e","f","g","h","i","j","k","l","m","n","o","p","q","r","s","t","u","v","w","x","y","z");
$i = #arr;
while ($i)
{
print $arr[$i];
$i--;
}
Using the range operator and the ranges you want to target:
use strict;
use warnings;
my #elements = ("aa" .. "zz");
for my $combo (#elements)
{
print "$combo\n";
}
You can utilize the initial 2 letters till the ending 2 letters you want as ending and the for will take care of everything.
This really isn't multi-dimensional array work, if it were you'd be working with stuff like:
my #foo = (
[1,2,3],
[4,7,8,1,2,3],
[2,3],
);
This is really a very basic how do I make a nested loop that iterates over the same array. I'll bet this is homework.
So, I'll let you figure out the nesting bits, but give some help with Perl's loop operators.
!! for/foreach
for (the each is optional) is the real heavy hitter for looping in perl. Use it like so:
for my $var ( #array ) {
#do stuff with $var
}
Each element in #array will be aliased to the $var variable, and the block of code will be executed. The fact that we are aliasing, rather than copying means that if alter the value of $var, #array will be changed as well. The stuff between the parenthesis may be any expression. The expression will be evaluated in list context. So if you put a file handle in the parens, the entire file will be read into memory and processed.
You can also leave off naming the loop variable, and $_ will be used instead. In general, DO NOT DO THIS.
!! C-Style for
Every once in a while you need to keep track of indexes as you loop over an array. This is when a C style for loop comes in handy.
for( my $i=0; $i<#array; $i++ ) {
# do stuff with $array[$i]
}
!! While/Until
While and until operate with boolean loop conditions. That means that the loop will repeat as long as the appropriate boolean value if found for the condition ( TRUE for while, and FALSE for until). In addition to the obvious cases where you are looking for a particular condition, while is great for processing a file one line at a time.
while ( my $line = <$fh> ) {
# Do stuff with $line.
}
!! map
map is an amazingly useful bit of functional programming kung-fu. It is used to turn one list into another. You pass an anonymous code reference that is used to enact the transformation.
# Multiply all elements of #old by two and store them in #new.
my #new = map { $_ * 2 } #old;
So how do you solve your particular problem? There are many ways. Which is best depends on how you want to use the results. If you want to create a new array of the letter pairs, use map. If you are interested primarily in a side effect (say printing a variable) use for. If you need to work with really big lists that come from sort of interator (like lines from a filehandle) use while.
Here's a solution. I wouldn't turn it in to your professor until you understand how it works.
print map { my $letter=$_; map "$letter$_\n", "a".."z" } "a".."z";
Look at perldoc articles, perlsyn for info on the looping constructs, perlfunc for info on map and look at perlop for info on the range operator (..).
Good luck.
Use the range operator (..) for your initialization. The range operator basically grabs a range of values such as numbers or characters.
Then use a nested loop to go through the array one time per character for a total of 26^2 iterations.
Rather than a while loop I've used a foreach loop to go through each item in the array. You could also put 'a' .. 'z' instead of declared #arr as the argument to the foreach loop. The foreach loops below set $char or $char2 to each value in #arr in turn.
my #arr = ('a' .. 'z');
for my $char (#arr) {
for my $char2 (#arr) {
print "$char$char2\n";
}
}
If all you really want to do is print the 676 strings you describe, then:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my $str = 'aa';
while (length $str < 3) {
print $str++, "\n";
}
But I smell an "XY problem"...