On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 16:19, Bob Showalter wrote: > Jose Alves de Castro wrote: > > On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 15:04, Tim McGeary wrote: > > > I need to pull out articles "a", "an", and "the" from the beginning > > > of title strings so that they sort properly in MySQL. What is the > > > best way to accomplish that if I have a single $scalar with the > > > whole title in it? > > > > I would go with substitutions: > > > > $scalar =~ s/^(?:a|an|the)//i; > > Two problems: > > 1. This doesn't remove just the whole words; it removes parts of words as > well. i.e. "Analyzing Widgets" would become "alyzing Widgets" > > 2. It doesn't remove whitespace after the word, so "The Widget Primer" > becomes " Widget Primer", which won't sort with the w's, due to the leading > blank. > > Perhaps: > > $scalar =~ s/^(a|an|the)\s*\b//i; > > would work better.
You're absolutely right. I think this is a sign that I need to go out, eat and drink something, breath some fresh air, etc. -- José Alves de Castro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://natura.di.uminho.pt/~jac
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