How can I extract a substring up to the first digit?

Question

How can I find the first substring until I find the first digit?

Example:

my $string = \'AAAA_BBBB_12_13_14\' ;

Result expected: \'AAA

Answer 1

Judging from the tags you want to use a regular expression. So let's build this up.

• We want to match from the beginning of the string so we anchor with a ^ metacharacter at the beginning
• We want to match anything but digits so we look at the character classes and find out this is \D
• We want 1 or more of these so we use the + quantifier which means 1 or more of the previous part of the pattern.

This gives us the following regular expression:

^\D+

Which we can use in code like so:

my $string = 'AAAA_BBBB_12_13_14';
$string =~ /^\D+/;
my $result = $&;