Is my Perl broken, or am I missing something here?

[spillin_dylan]

I am writing a Perl script to try and find my external IP address. I have parsed a HTML page down to one line containing the IP address, along with some text. This line of text is saved within a variable. I am having problems getting the numbers out of this variable using regex. Here is what I have:


$ipaddr = `wget --quiet --tries=3 -O - http://checkmyip.com/ | grep id=\"ip\"` ; # Get the IP address, and put it in a variable.
$_ = $ipaddr;
/.*(\d.*\d).*$/;
print $1 . "\n";
exit 0;

I think that the \d should match the first and last digits in the variable (greedy matching) and the brackets should put it into variable $1. But when I try this out I get:

Use of uninitialized value $1 in string at /home/spillin/bin/newipnotify.pl line 95.


Sorry if I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm still learning....

Thanks!
-spillin

[Some Penguin]

I wouldn't write the expression that way; if greediness is done left-to-right, you'll get the last two digits in the string. In addition, since you're not using ^, the leading .* is only likely to be harmful.

Given the syntax of the response



/>(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d)</


seems more promising.

[spillin_dylan]

Thank you very much! I think that was my problem, or close to it anyhow. I fiddled with your code, and was still not getting results until I realized that there should be one extra plus sign near the end, as it was looking for a pattern with only one digit at the end.



/>(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)</


Anyhow, I finally got it working. It might not be the prettiest Perl script ever, but I bet it's not the ugliest, either! Thanks Some_Penguin for the help!!!