[tpm] Dumb regex question

[Andy Jack]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 12:15:45PM -0400, Madison Kelly wrote:
> All I want is to be able to match a word-character string that may have 
> a hyphen in it.
> 
> So:
> 
> mizu-bu		# should match
> alteeve		# should match
> m!zu-bu		# should not match
> a|teeve		# should not match

/me warms up clue-stick

if ( $str =~ m#\A[\w\-]+\z# ) {
    # matched
}
else {
    # didn't match
}

\A matches the absolute beginning of the string, \z matches the absolute
end.  \w is the alphanumeric character class [0-9A-Za-z_] depending on
your locale, and the hyphen is added since you wanted it.  + says "one
or more characters in this class".

So the regex says the string must be composed entirely of one or more
alphanumeric characters plus hyphen.

HTH Andy