How to split a string with multiple patterns in perl?

Question

I want to split a string with multiple patterns:

ex.

my $string= "10:10:10, 12/1/2011";

my @string = split(/firstpattern/secondpattern/thirdpattern/, $string);

foreach(@string) {
    print "$_\n";
}

I want to have an output of:

10
10
10
12
 1
2011

What is the proper way to do this?

Answer 1

Use a character class in the regex delimiter to match on a set of possible delimiters.

my $string= "10:10:10, 12/1/2011";
my @string = split /[:,\s\/]+/, $string;

foreach(@string) {
    print "$_\n";
}

Explanation

• The pair of slashes /.../ denotes the regular expression or pattern to be matched.

• The pair of square brackets [...] denotes the character class of the regex.

• Inside is the set of possible characters that can be matched: colons :, commas ,, any type of space character \s, and forward slashes \/ (with the backslash as an escape character).

• The + is needed to match on 1 or more of the character immediately preceding it, which is the entire character class in this case. Without this, the comma-space would be considered as 2 separate delimiters, giving you an additional empty string in the result.