I have the following string: SL2.40ch12:53884872-53885197.
I would like to assign SL2.40ch12 to $chromosome, 53884872 to $start and 53885197 to $end. What's an efficient way using regular expression for doing this?
Here's how I tried doing it but my regex is off.
my $string = SL2.40ch12:53884872-53885197
my $chromosome =~ /^*\:$/
my $start =~ /^+d\-$/
my $end =~ /^-+d\/
thanks
For that particular string, you can do something simple like this:
my $string = "SL2.40ch12:53884872-53885197";
my ($chr, $start, $end) = split /[:-]/, $string, 3;
If you want it a little stricter, do them separately
my ($chr, $range) = split /:/, $string, 2;
my ($start, $end) = split /-/, $range;
This is, of course, assuming that you will not have colons or dashes appearing elsewhere in your data.
[:-] like your smiles :)Here is a regex that may do what you want:
($chromosome, $begin, $end) = /^(.*):(.*)-(.*)$/;
I'm not really familiar with Perl, but if it uses common regexp syntax than your $start and $chromosome lines have an mistake. '$' - means end-of-the-line. So it will try to find dash at the end of the line.
