Thank you to everyone I now have a much better understanding of parsing lines,
Robb PS could you recommend any good starter perl books? On Fri, 2002-12-27 at 16:50, R. Joseph Newton wrote: > my $InString = "<programme start="20021221235500 UTC" stop="20021222001000 UTC" > channel="carlton.com">" > if ($InString =~ /\bprogramme start=\"(.*)\" stop=\"(.*)\" channel=\"(.*)\"/) { > my $programme = $1; > my $start = $2; > my $channel = $3; > } > What happens here is that the parentheses around each sought-after value set it to >one of the built-in regex variables--$1, $2...$n, in order from their appearance in >the the comparison string. Thus you can call them back to assign them to program >variables. I'm not sure about the scoping for these special variables, but so far >I've had success using them within the block for which the regex is part of the >control expression. > > This is of course, not a generalized solution. It presupposes that you will always >be using this function to parse tags of that exact format. The other suggestions >offeredprobably provide somewhat greater generality. I offer this because it shows a >closer connection to the material in hand. I find that I find it much easier to >debug when I can look at the code and know exactly what the string I'm trying to >crunch should look like. > > Joseph > > Robert Boardman wrote: > > > Hi all > > I'm attempting to write my first perl script to parse a couple of lines > > and would appreciate some help extracting data from the folloing example > > > > Data: > > <programme start="20021221235500 UTC" stop="20021222001000 UTC" > > channel="carlton.com"> > > > > I want to extract 0021221235500 and 20021222001000 and carlton.com > > > > I have tried to to use pattern matching using =~ etc but cannot seem to > > get the pattern correct > > anybody any ideas? > > > > Robb > > > > -- > > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]