Wildcards and substuting text

[KingofSnake]

I'm starting up in perl and, doing the poor student thing, went to Books A Million and glanced over some perl books to try to find out what I needed to do. But I just got more confused then I already was.

What I want to do is to replace all text before a certain character with nothing, and replace all text after a certain charater with nothing. For example:

texttext##special##texttext

I would want to get rid of everything before the first ## and everything after the second ##, creating

##special##

How would I do that?
KingOfSnake - The only sports drink with ice crystals
(and marshmellos!)

 

[MikeLacey]

there's prob a single command way to do this (cue goBoating with a more elegant solution as soon as I've finished )
[tt]
$spec_chars = '##';
$_ = "texttext##special##texttext";
/$spec_chars/; # find the first one
$_ = $'; # only keep stuff after match
/$spec_chars/; # find the second one
$_ = $`; # only keep stuff before match
$_ = "$spec_chars$_$spec_chars"; # restore special characters
[/tt] Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.

 

[danielhozac]

This might work too:
$string = "text##special##text";
$specchars = "##";
$string =~ s/(.*)($specchars(.*)$specchars)(.*)/$2/; //Daniel

 

[Coderifous]

($string = "text##special##text&quot =~ s/.*##(.*?)##.*/$1/g;

 

[tsdragon]

Shouldn't you have the ? added to the first and last .* too, to prevent them from matching any # found? i.e.:

s/.*?##(.*?)##.*?/$1/g;

What should happen if you have one of these cases?

sometext##string1##moretext##string2
sometext##string1##sometext##string2##sometext

Believe me, I've run into cases like that, since I have an HTML preprocessor routine that uses ##...## as a preprocessor tag. Tracy Dryden
tracy@bydisn.com

http://www.bydisn.com

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.