asked on

Perl regex - Get certain numbers out of a path

I need a regex to extract the digits out of the path "/my/pictures/album_\d\d\d". It would need to be able to handle the following types of URLs:

/my/pictures/album_123

/my/pictures/album_123foo

/my/pictures/album_123/foo

/my/pictures/album_123foo/foo123

Specifically I need only the numbers after '/my/pictures/album_'

Thanks!

Tintin

$url='/my/pictures/album_123foo/foo123';

if ($url =~ /album_(\d\d\d)/) {
$num = $1;
}

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

ozo

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mjcoyne

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my @paths = qw(
/my/pictures/album_123
/my/pictures/album_123foo
/my/pictures/album_123/foo
/my/pictures/album_123foo/foo123
);

for (@paths) {
/album_(\d+)/;
print "$1\n";
}

ozo

The choice of just one of the 3 comments as the accepted solution seems a little arbitrary

ozo

The 3 do differ in what they would do with
qw(
/my/pictures/album_123
album_456/my/pictures/album_123
/my/pictures/1234
/my/pictures/album_12
);
but since the question was somewhat ambiguous about exactly should be done in those cases
it would seem more fair to clarify the question before rejecting answers that didn't correctly guess the intent of the question.

zumpoof

ASKER

Ozo,

My apologies; I just realized that I wasn't clear enough in the cases I listed and will post a clarification next time. Is there anything I can do to rectify the what's been done?