http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=67370


in reply to split delimiters II

Unless you post a complete example of the line to be parsed, we cannot help you. Since I am a nice guy, though, I will explain why you need more than split for this problem.

The better solution would be to use the m// operator and the grouping variables: $1, $2, etc. I'll explain by parsing an entry from an Apache web server access log

$line = '127.0.0.1 - - [26/Mar/2001:16:01:07 -0500] "GET /stuff/ HTTP/ +1.0" 200 11874'
Each entry is seperated by dashes, brackets, or quotes - but since we know the general layout, we can write a regualar expression that is general enough to parse each line, but specific enough to get the data we want - just the IP of the referrer, the date stamp and the requested document ( along with request type)
use strict; my ($ip,$date,$method,$file,$header,$status,$pid) = $line =~ /^([\d.]+) # $id = ip quad \s*-\s*-\s* # skip over these \[(.*?)\]\s" # $date = everything between the brackets (\w+)\s* # $method = the method, usually GET or POST ([^\s]+)\s* # $file = everything UP TO the next white space (.*)"\s* # $header = everything UP TO the next double quote (\d+)\s* # $status = digits between spaces (\d+)\s*$/x; # $pid = last set of digits print "$ip\n$date\n$method\n$file\n$status\n$pid\n";
By no means I am an master of regular expressions, the ones I chose just happen to work - there are better ways then using .* - but a little badness won't kill ya' :)

Big Thanks to Albannach.

Jeff

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