Question

I’m trying to grab each word in the string that can be separated by various number of whitespaces.

my $ff = "Disk  DSM     Policy  Paths   Serials";

if($ff =~ m/(\w+)/) {
    print $1;
    print $2;
    print $3;
}

I thought it would be as simple as \w but it only gets the first word? Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

You need to match globally.

my $ff = "Disk  DSM     Policy  Paths   Serials";

my (@words_match) = $ff =~ /(\w+)/g;
# (
#     'Disk',
#     'DSM',
#     'Policy',
#     'Paths',
#     'Serials'
# )

A better solution is to split.

my @words_split = split ' ', $ff;
# (
#     'Disk',
#     'DSM',
#     'Policy',
#     'Paths',
#     'Serials'
# )