Finding index of white space in Perl - perl

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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).

Answer 3

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).

Answer 4

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