Question

I know this might be very easy to some,,

I have a simple string like this @¨0­[phone] (with characters before a mobile number). My question is, how do i remove all the characters before the plus(+)? What i know is to remove a known character as follows:

$number =~ tr/://d; (if i want to remove a colon)

But here, I want all characters before ‘+’ to be removed.

Answer 1

To remove everything up to and including the first +, you can do:

$number ~= s/.*\+//;

If you want to keep the +, you can put that into the replacement:

$number ~= s/.*\+/+/;

The above says: Match “anything” (the .*) followed by a + (+ is a special character in regular expressions, which is why it needs the backslash escape) and replace it with nothing (or in the above example, replace it with a single +).

Note that the above will strip out everything up to the LAST + in the string, which may not be what you want. If you want to keep strip out everything up to the FIRST + in a string, you can do:

$number =~ s/[^+]*\+//;

or

$number =~ s/[^+]*\+/+/; # Keep the +

The difference from the first regular expression being the [^+]* instead of .*, which means “match any character except a +“.

For more information on Perl’s regular expressions, the perldoc perlre manual page is pretty good, as is O’Reilly’s Mastering Regular Expressions book.