Question

I’m playing and learning Perl so that I can read log files. I want to search every line and look for a string of alphanumeric followed by this ; at the beginning of each line.

This is part of what I have:

 if ($line =~ /\S([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*)/)

but I think this is wrong.

Please advise.

Answer 1

Try:

if ($line =~ /^[a-z0-9]+;/i) { ... }

^ matches the start of a line. The + matches once or more. /i makes the search case-insensitive.