Greetings Monks, This must be an extremely easy question to answer, but much searching has not yielded the answer I seek. I am parsing messages from TSM, which have a format like this:

ANE4954I Total number of objects backed up: 3

I need the "ANE4951I" part of the string, which can be found by simply applying the following regular expression: s/\s.*// However, I don't wish to change the original text, so I reasoned that as $a=+1 is equivalent to $a=$a+1, so $a=~s/\s.*// should be equivalent to $a = $a ~ s/\s.*//, enabling me to express my needs thus:

$message_id=$message ~ s/\s.*//;
[download]

Sadly, this gives me a syntax error. What is the correct syntax for this? For now, I have coded it like this:

$message_id=$message;
$message_id=~s/\s.*//;
[download]

But I suspect there is a better way. Thanks,
Menno

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