Question

So I have an ID range for pages in a document that I need to loop to compare values. My problem is the ID’s are strings and not number so when I try and loop the range with Perl it doesn’t work. Here is an example of my range loop, and an example of my data.

foreach($begID..$endID){
   print $_;
}

A data example would be

 $begID = ABC-ABC-00001; 
 $endID = ABC-ABC-00100;

My problem is I cannot loop these values. I know I could split the data based on the “-” and get the 00001 and 00100 values, but the problem with that is the data can vary on different files I am working with.

Is there any other way that someone could suggest to go about this?

UPDATE

Until I can post my own answer (in another 7 hours due to being under 100 rep) here is what I came up with:

Okay here is what I did as a solution. I can regex out the numbers starting from the end until it hits an alpha character.

($start) = $begID =~ m/(\d+)$/;
($end) = $endID =~ m/(\d+)$/;

Then create the loop from there.

Answer 1

“data can vary” how?

If by having a fixed string prefix + the number, you can split off the prefix:

my ($prefix, $start) = ($begID =~ /^(\D+)(\d+)$/;
my ($prefix2, $end) = ($endID =~ /^(\D+)(\d+)$/;
die "Prefixes don't match" unless prefix eq $prefix2;
foreach my $index ($start .. $end) {
    my $id = "prefix$index";
}