Hello catfish1116,
Other monks have shown you where the problem lies, but (strangely) no-one has made the fix explicit: change the regular expression from /^barney/m to /^\s*barney/m.
This says: match any line beginning with zero or more whitespace characters followed by “barney”.
Perhaps it will make things a little clearer if we break the string into lines, and apply the regex to each line in turn:
use strict;
use warnings;
my $para = 'This is a wilma line
barney is on this line
but this line ends with fred
** this line has barney in the middle **
and a final dino line';
my $count = 0;
for my $line (split /\n/, $para)
{
printf "line %d: >%s< -- barney %sfound\n", ++$count, $line,
$line =~ /^\s*barney/ ? '' : 'not ';
}
Output:
13:49 >perl 1958_SoPW.pl
line 1: >This is a wilma line< -- barney not found
line 2: > barney is on this line< -- barney found
line 3: > but this line ends with fred< -- barney not found
line 4: > ** this line has barney in the middle **< -- barney
+not found
line 5: > and a final dino line< -- barney not found
13:49 >
(Of course, when we know we’re dealing with a single line at a time, the /m modifier is no longer needed on the regex.)
Hope that helps,
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