Finding partial matches

Question

Say, I have lines like:

SOMETHING.AA.AA.DARKSIDE

BLaH.AA.AA.Blah

I want to find for each line $before = $1; $after = $2; of the $middle = ”AA” Such that for example for line 1 I get:

$before= “SOMETHING.”
$After = “.AA.DARKSIDE”

And also

$before= “SOMETHING.AA”
$After = “.DARKSIDE”

My code looks like this:

$middle = “AA”;  

foreach (@lines){

   $line = $_;   

   while ($line =~m/^(.+)$middle(.+)$/g){

      $before = $1;
      $after  = $2;
  }
}

Is there a simple way to change regex in my while? PS: $middle will be a variable so i cannot hardcode it. Thank you for help.

Answer 1

Why do you want to use regexes for that?

($before, $after) = split(/$middle\.$middle/, $line);

And then use $before and $after each once without and once with $middle concatenated to the end and start of the string respectively.