On 4/25/05, Kevin Horton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm trying to write a perl one-liner that will edit an iCalendar > format file to remove To Do items. The file contains several > thousand lines, and I need to remove several multi-line blocks. The > blocks to remove start with a line "BEGIN:VTODO" (without the quotes) > and end with a line "END:VTODO" (also without quotes). > > I've tried the following one-liner, > > perl -p -i.bak -e 's/BEGIN:VTODO.*END:VTODO//sg' file_name_to_edit > > The .bak file is created, which tells me the one-liner is finding my > file, but the file is identical to the old one - i.e. the regex > doesn't seem to be matching anything.
-p causes the file to be read one line at a time, which negates the usefulness of /s. If you have sufficient RAM to read the entire file into memory, you can use the -0 option to "slurp" the file: perl -0777 -p -i.bak -e 's/BEGIN:VTODO.*?END:VTODO//sg' see perldoc perlrun for details > > I'm also wondering whether my proposed one-liner (if it worked) would > be too greedy. Would it pull out everything between the first > BEGIN:VTODO and the last END:VTODO? > Yes it will. HTH, --jay -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
