RE: Need help with a regex

[Tim Johnson]

Ooh.  That's embarassing.  I didn't pay close enough attention to the OP.  Some of the 
inside matches contain spaces.  My regex should have been:
 
/^\S+\s+(.+)\s+/
 
which would match:

*       the beginning of the line (^)
*       followed by one or more non-whitespace characters (\S+)
*       followed by one or more whitespace characters (\s+)
*       followed by one or more of any characters including whitespace (.+)
*       followed by one or more whitespace characters (\s+)

because Perl will match the largest possible number of characters, the .+ will match 
everything between the two outside spaces.

        -----Original Message----- 
        From: Tim Johnson 
        Sent: Thu 1/22/2004 9:31 PM 
        To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
        Cc: 
        Subject: RE: Need help with a regex
        
        

        Try this on for size:
        
        #####################
        use strict;
        use warnings;
        my @cities = ();
        open(INFILE,"myfile.txt") || die "Couldn't open myfile.txt for reading!\n";
        while(<INFILE>){
             $_ =~ /^\S+\s+(\S+)/;
             push @cities,$1;
        }
        #do something to @cities
        
        #####################
        
        which basically means to match:
        
        *       the start of the line (^)
        *       followed by one or more non-whitespace characters (\S+)
        *       followed by one or more whitespace characters (\s+)
        *       followed by one or more non-whitespace characters (\S+)
        
        the parentheses around the last non-whitespace match assign it to $1
        
        Note:  Check out "perldoc perlre" for the man pages.  It might be worth 
looking over real quick before you dig into the book.
        
        Or, for the quick and easy way without a regex, how bout:
        
        #############################
        
        use strict;
        use warnings;
        my @cities;
        open(INFILE,"myfile.txt") || die "Could not open myfile.txt for reading!\n";
        while(<INFILE>){
           push @cities,(split /\s+/,$_)[1];
        }
        
        #############################
        
        which does a split on the line and returns the second element of the resulting 
list and assigns it to @cities.
        
                -----Original Message-----
                From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
                Sent: Thu 1/22/2004 9:01 PM
                To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
                Cc:
                Subject: Need help with a regex
               
               
        
                This newbie needs help with a regex.  Here's what the data from a text
                file looks like. There's no delimiter and the fields aren't evenly 
spaced
                apart.
               
                apples          San Antonio      Fruit
                oranges Sacramento             Fruit
                pineapples     Honolulu         Fruit
                lemons    Corona del Rey       Fruit
               
                Basically, I want to put the city names into an array.  The first 
field,
                the fruit name, is always one word with no spaces.