CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexperlfile-extensionfilepath
Chris
Chris

Reputation: 12078

Remove file extension and path from a string in Perl

I want to obtain a file name without its path (if it is part of the string) and also the extension.

For example: 

/path/to/file/fileName.txt     # results in "fileName"
fileName.txt                   # results in "fileName"
/path/to/file/file.with.periods.txt    # results in "file.with.periods"

So basically, I want to remove anything before and including the last "/" if present and also the last "." along with any meta characters after it.

Sorry for such a novice question, but I am new to perl.

Upvotes: 38

Views: 76329

Answers (3)

Eugene Yarmash
Eugene Yarmash

Reputation: 149796

Assuming that the path separator is '/', you can do it with a pair of substitutions:

$name =~ s{^.*/}{};     # remove the leading path  
$name =~ s{\.[^.]+$}{}; # remove the extension

You can also write that as a single substitution:

$name =~ s{^.*/|\.[^.]+$}{}g;

Upvotes: 19

rafl
rafl

Reputation: 12341

For portably getting the basename of a file given a full path, I'd recommend the File::Basename module, which is part of the core.

To do heuristics on file extensions I'd go for a regular expression like

(my $without_extension = $basename) =~ s/\.[^.]+$//;

Upvotes: 44

Chris
Chris

Reputation: 12078

Although others have responded, after reading a bit on basename per rafl's answer: 

($file,$dir,$ext) = fileparse($fullname, qr/\.[^.]*/);
# dir="/usr/local/src/" file="perl-5.6.1.tar" ext=".gz"

Seems to solve the problem in one line.

Are there any problems related with this, opposed to the other solutions?

Upvotes: 24

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