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Re^3: How best to strip text from a file?

by Corion (Pope)
on Nov 05, 2012 at 14:49 UTC ( #1002335=note: print w/ replies, xml ) Need Help??

in reply to Re^2: How best to strip text from a file?
in thread How best to strip text from a file?

Where does one record end and the next record start?

If FOO: marks the start of a new record, I wouldn't try to collect everything with one regular expression but go through the input line by line, and either set up a new field name into which to collect, or flush the current set of data once a new starting marker has been found:

use strict; use Data::Dumper; my %record; sub flush { print Dumper \%record; %record = (); }; my $current; while (<DATA>) { if( /^(FOO):(.*)/ ) { flush() if keys %record; $current = $1; $record{ $current }.= $2; } elsif( /^([A-Z]+):(.*)/ ) { $current = $1; $record{ $current }.= $2; } else { $record{ $current }.= $_; }; }; flush() if keys %record; __DATA__ FOO: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore BAR: 2012 BAZ: 1234-567-890 FOO: test BAZ: 0987-654-321 FOO: test2 BAR: 2014

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