Iterating a string through each character

Tuesday, April 29, 2014 perl , perl script 0 Comments

In general if there is a need for us to iterate though a string character by character, then we normally split the string using a statement like:

@chars=split("",$var);

Now after the array is created we iterate through that array.But an easy way of doing this in Perl without creating an array is :

while ($var =~ /(.)/sg) {
   my $char = $1;
   print $char."\n"
}

Below is the explanation for the same:

$var =~ /(.)/sg

Match any character though out the string and round braces "()" captures the matched character.
/s 
Treat string as single line. That is, change "." to match any character whatsoever, even a newline, which normally it would not match.
/g
Match all occurrences of the regexp throughout the line instead of only the first occurrence.