The following code apparently is not doing what I wanted. My intention was to confirm that the general format of $student_id was this: several uppercase letters followed by a hyphen followed by several digits. If not, it would trigger the die. Unfortunately it seems to always trigger the die. For example, if I let student_id = triplett-1, the script dies. I’m a beginner, so I often have trouble seeing the “obvious.” Any suggestions will be appreciated!
if ( $student_id =~ / (\A[a-z]+) # match and capture leading alphabetics - # hyphen to separate surname from number ([0-9]+\z) # match and capture trailing digits /xms # Perl Best Practices ) { $student_surname = $1; $student_number = $2; } else { die "Bad general form for student_id: $student_id" }; -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/