Entry

I want to look for a text, then grab the next 2 characters after the found text. Please Help!

Apr 25th, 2003 21:18
Colin Thomsen, Chris Leon,

Regular expressions would work well for this job. You need to put the 
unknown text into a string (we'll call it $string) and the text to find 
in another string (call it $textToFind).

Then you apply a regular expression to the string using the format:

$string =~ //;

In your example you want to first match the text to find, which you can 
do:

$string =~ /$textToFind/;

Then you want to return the next two characters, which you do using (). 
Anything inside the () is returned in the special variable $1. The next 
set of () is returned in $2 and so on. To match any character, you can 
use the special '.' matching character:

$string =~ /$textToFind(..)/;
print $1;

Note that the above code assumes that the string does have the text you 
are looking for. If you're not sure, use an if, as follows:

if ($string =~ /$textToFind(..)/) {
    print $1;
} else {
    print "$textToFind not found!";
}

The complete program is listed below:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT

my $string = "somestring text12";
my $textToFind = "text";

if ($string =~ /$textToFind(..)/) {
	print "$1\n";
}