How to read the next word after a keyword found

Question

How to read the next word after a keyword found

Sina (TechnicalUser)

(OP)

10 Jan 03 00:04

Hello everyone,

HOw can I read the next word after a keyword if found in a string.

i.e
The blue cat ( run over the car).

I like to say, if the word "cat" found, read the next character or word which is in this case "(" or it could be a period or a ";" or even another word.

and ignoring any spaces
Thanks much

marblecat (Programmer) · Answer 1 · 2003-01-10 01:26:37

#! usr/bin/perl
$_="The blue cat ( run over the car).";
/cat\s/;
@after=split(/\s/,$');
print $after[0],"\n";

#$after[0] is what you want

tanderso (IS/IT--Management) · Answer 2 · 2003-01-10 02:19:55

my $string = "The blue cat ( run over the car).";
my $word = "cat";
$string =~ /$word\s*?(\S+)/;
my $next_word = $1;
print qq~The word after "$word" is "$next_word".~;

This will only find the first instance in the string. If the string were "The big cat ate the little cat for dinner.", then it would stop after "cat ate".

Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.
http://www.oac-design.com

MikeLacey (MIS) · Answer 3 · 2003-01-10 04:22:38

an addition to marblcat's reply

@after=split(/\s+/,$');

The addition of the + in the pattern let's it match one or more white-space characters, the other \s should be \s+ as well.

Mike

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tanderso (IS/IT--Management) · Answer 4 · 2003-01-10 04:33:49

Oh yeah, that reminds me... by using \s*?, it will in fact return "fish" after "cat" if you had "catfish". But by using + instead of *, then you only match the whole word instead of a part of the word.

Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.
http://www.oac-design.com

justice41 (Programmer) · Answer 5 · 2003-01-10 13:19:45

A slight modification of Tom's regex:

$string =~ /cat\b\s*(\S+)/;

This will capture the '(' from your posted string and any word that follows cat, like 'in' from "cat in the hat". It will also capture a '.' or a ';' that follow cat (typically without a space), but won't capture 'alogue' from "catalogue" or 'fish' from "catfish". The '\b' matches a word boundary, which is the nonspace between a word character, \w, and a non-word character, \W.

jaa

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How to read the next word after a keyword found