Question

I am trying to search and replace a string that is up to and including 3 characters in length with nothing (so ‘deleting’ the element contents).

So I have something like:

foreach (@array) {
   s/^{1,3}$//;
}

E.g.

@array = ('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six', 'seven');

So when printing, expected output would be:

result:  result:  result: three  result: four  result: five  result:  result: seven

So for the affected inputs, the output would be an ’empty place’.

This at the moment doesn’t happen… I’m betting I’m making a simple mistake due to my still-shaky understanding of regex. Any help appreciated!

If there is a simple way to actually remove the element totally without creating a new array, that would also be useful to know.

Answer 1

Simple regex problem aside, you can use grep to select the elements you want:

@array = grep { !/^.{1,3}$/ } @array;

Then just print the results:

print "Result: $_\n" foreach @array;

Results:

Result: three
Result: four
Result: five
Result: seven