PERL Regex help matching a string in a field

Question

I currently have a field that looks like this.

item description is blah ablha blabh albhalbh #thisisitemnumber x/skid)

I am trying to extract the #thisisitemnumber portion. I currently have this:

'/(#.*\\S)/'

But using that I get everything after the "#" even the whitespace. Any help is appreciated!

Thanks :)

Answer 1

You are matching any char . any number of times * until non-space \\S . This isn't really what you want. Also, since * is greedy it scoops up everything up to the last non-space in the string.

You want non-space one or more times:

/(#\S+)/;

This presumes that there should be something after # , thus the +