String substitution at the beginning

[rob51383]

I have been playing with perl for a few months now and can do alot with it but these string matching / substitution things always get to me, thanks in advanced for any help. My problem:

I have a variable which can be something like:

my $var = "10 sometext, some more, and 3 more"
or
my $var = "1 sometext, some more, and 3 more"

now I have a new variable say:
$id = "1"

I want to say if the first number in $var i.e(10, 1) = $id then do something.

So what if I split the string $var at the FIRST space and assigned the number to $newvar. I think that will work but how do I code that?

 

[rob51383]

I managed to complete it. I just used the "SPLIT" function to split $var at ' ' into a string then assigned @ARRAY[0] to $newvar.

If you know a better way to do it I am open to change.

 

[philote]

You could use a regular expression:

$var =~ /^(\d*)/;
if($id == $1){...

The =~ /.../ says to match what's in the regular expression (between the slashes) with what's in $var. The regular expression says look at the the beginning of the string, ^, and find zero or more numbers, \d*. The parentheses make those numbers available in the $1 variable.