Question

Within a Perl script I need to process the following string:

426852  total

The string will always contain an integer followed by some white space and the word total. I need to strip away the string part of the variable to just leave an integer that I can compare later in the script.

What is the best way to achieve this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Since you don’t need the rest, just finding leading digits is enough:

$str =~ /^(\d+)/;

^ – beginning of string, \d – digit, + – one or more. Result will be in $1, captured by ()