Can I use a full word to split on a string?

Question

This may be a simpleton question. I have a string that is consistent with the content. It will contain the word "IMAGE" . I want to be able to split on this word so I get the content after the word. I tried:

my @sname = split('IMAGE', $fshare);

$fshare contains a string such as '\\\\Disk\\InfoIMAGEstuff' . I want the 'stuff' part.

Answer 1

The first argument to split is a regex pattern, not a string. You can pass a third argument as a limit to prevent it from splitting into more than 2 strings (more than once).

my ($before, $after) = split /IMAGE/, $fshare, 2;

If the string you want to split on contains regex metacharacters, you will want to use \\Q so the string is interpreted literally.

my ($before, $after) = split /\Qfoo.bar/, $fshare, 2;

If you only care about what is after the delimiter, you can use a simple regex capture to retrieve this.

my ($after) = $fshare =~ m/IMAGE(.*)/s;

The /s modifier allows . to additionally match newlines.

Answer 2

If you just want to get the part after the string, you could avoid using split (and the RegEx engine) all together and use string ops instead.

my $string = '\\Disk\InfoIMAGEstuff';
my $delim  = 'IMAGE';
my $post   = substr($string, index($string, $delim) + length($delim));

It's not super pretty, but it benchmarks twice as fast as using split . Even though we are calling 3 functions ( substr , index , and length ), string ops like these are incredibly fast.

In this example, index matches the first occurrence of $delim . If you want to match the last occurrence, use rindex instead.