Question

i have following variable. i only want to print yes if the variable has “imoport/canada/campingplaces/tobermory” not # or anything. What should insert in a regex for this kind of things.

  my $textfile = "# imoport/canada/campingplaces/tobermory
                    imoport/canada/campingplaces/tobermory
                  #imoport/canada/campingplaces/tobermory";
  my $textNeeded= "imoport/canada/campingplaces/tobermory"

THIS IS WHAT i am using

  if ($textfile =~ m/$textNeeded/i) {
       print "yes working"

  }

note:- i am getting data from differnt text files so some text files might just have “#imoport/canada/campingplaces/tobermory”. I want to avoid those

Answer 1

Despite the quite vague problem description, I think I have puzzled out what you mean. You mean you may have lines where the text is commented out with #, and you want to avoid matching those.

print "yes" if $textfile =~ /^\s*$textNeeded/im;

This will match any string inside $textfile which has a newline followed by optional whitespace followed by your string. The /m option makes the regex multiline, meaning that ^ and $ match line endings represented by newlines inside a larger string.

You may wish to be wary of regex meta characters in your search string. If for example your search string is foo[bar].txt, those brackets will be interpreted as a character class instead. In which case you would use

/^\s*\Q$textNeeded\E/im

instead. The \Q ... \E will make the text inside match only literal characters.