Remove file extension and path from a string in Perl

regex perl file-extension filepath
Chris picture Chris · Sep 8, 2010 · Viewed 65.1k times · Source

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.

Answer

rafl picture rafl · Sep 8, 2010

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

Related questions

Regex to match any character including new lines

Is there a regex to match "all characters including newlines"? For example, in the regex below, there is no output from $2 because (.+?) doesn't include new lines when matching. $string = "START Curabitur mollis, dolor ut rutrum consequat, arcu nisl ultrices diam, …

Read More
How to extract string following a pattern with grep, regex or perl

I have a file that looks something like this: <table name="content_analyzer" primary-key="id"> <type="global" /> </table> <table name="content_analyzer2" primary-key="id"> <type="global" /> </table> <…

Read More
How to match any non white space character except a particular one?

In Perl \S matches any non-whitespace character. How can I match any non-whitespace character except a backslash \?

Read More