Splitting a changing string with perl

Question

I have a bunch of strings in perl that all look like this:

10 NE HARRISBURG
4 E HASWELL
2 SE OAKLEY
6 SE REDBIRD
PROVO
6 W EADS
21 N HARRISON

What I am needing to do is remove the numbers and the letters from before the city names. The problem I am having is that it varies a lot from city to city. The data is almost never the same. Is it possible to remove this data and keep it in a separate string?

Answer 1

my @l = (
'10 NE HARRISBURG',
'4 E HASWELL',
'2 SE OAKLEY',
'6 SE REDBIRD',
'PROVO',
'6 W EADS',
'21 N HARRISON',
);

foreach(@l) {

according to hoobs i changed the regex

    my($beg, $rest) = ($_ =~ /^(\d*\s(?:[NS]|[NS]?[EW])*)?(.*)$/);
    print "beg=$beg \trest=$rest\n";    
}

output:

beg=10 NE   rest=HARRISBURG
beg=4 E     rest=HASWELL
beg=2 SE    rest=OAKLEY
beg=6 SE    rest=REDBIRD
beg=    rest=PROVO
beg=6 W     rest=EADS
beg=21 N    rest=HARRISON

for shinjuo, if you want to run only one string you can do :

  my($beg, $rest) = ($l[3] =~ /^(\d*\s(?:[NS]|[NS]?[EW])*)?(.*)$/);
  print "beg=$beg \trest=$rest\n";

and to avoid warning on uninitialized value you have to test if $beg is defined:

print defined$beg?"beg=$beg\t":"", "rest=$rest\n";