perl exact string match

Question

I have following Perl code to prompt user for yes/no answer. If the user enters anything else than yes/no, keep prompting. No other word is acceptable. I don\'t know why thi

Answer 1

Because you're using a regular expression. You could write the regular expression to match the beginning or end of the string ... like this:

while( $file_yes_no !~ /^(yes|no)$/ ) {

The ^ and $ are the beginning and end of the string. Also you can omit the m.

Or you could just check the values explicitly:

while( $file_yes_no ne "yes" and $file_yes_no ne "no" ) {

Also you have a typo in your system command but I'm assuming that was just copying it here. You really shouldn't branch out to a shell for that. Look into File::Copy which gives you a copy function