extract string between two dots

Question

I have a string of the following format:

word1.word2.word3

What are the ways to extract word2 from that string in perl? I tried the following expression but it assigns 1 to sub:

@perleval $vars{sub} = $vars{string} =~ /.(.*)./; 0@

EDIT:

I have tried several suggestions, but still get the value of 1. I suspect that the entire expression above has a problem in addition to parsing. However, when I do simple assignment, I get the correct result:

@perleval $vars{sub} = $vars{string} ; 0@

assigns word1.word2.word3 to variable sub

Answer 1

Try:

/\.([^\.]+)\./

. has a special meaning and would need to be escaped. Then you would want to capture the values between the dots, so use a negative character class like ([^\.]+) meaning at least one non-dot. if you use (.*) you will get:

word1.stuff1.stuff2.stuff3.word2 to result in:

stuff1.stuff2.stuff3

But maybe you want that?

Here is my little example, I do find the perl one liners a little harder to read at times so I break it out:

use strict;
use warnings;

if ("stuff1.stuff2.stuff3" =~ m/\.([^.]+)\./) {
    my $value = $1;
    print $value;
}
else {
    print "no match";
}

result

stuff2