in reply to Help please?

Welcome to the monastery.

For posting, use <code>code tags</code> around your code.

Useless use of cat: Put the filename after all other perl arguments, such as: 

perl -ne "blah" filename

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You probably meant $3 instead of the duplicate $2.

.* is greedy, and will tend to eat too much. Given your input example, you might use \S+ to only capture non-whitespace, and .*? to be non-greedy elsewhere. Or, perhaps constrain your regex more with /Turn.*?speaker=(\S+)\s+startTime=(\S+)\s+endTime=(\S+)/

On Windoze/DOS, quoting is an issue, but you don't seem to have a problem so far. I prefer to use qq// and q// for quoting in perl oneliners. For example: 

perl -ne "print qq/$1 $2 $3\n/ if (/Turn.*?speaker=(\S+)\s+startTime=(
+\S+)\s+endTime=(\S+)/)" input_file > toto.xxx

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To check the compile without running, add -c as a perl option: 

perl -c -ne "print qq/$1 $2 $3\n/ if (/Turn.*?speaker=(\S+)\s+startTim
+e=(\S+)\s+endTime=(\S+)/)"
-e syntax OK

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-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Help please?
by Guigou (Initiate) on May 30, 2014 at 10:15 UTC

    So I tried :

    perl -ne "print qq/$1 $2 $3\n/ if (/Turn.*?speaker=(\S+)\s+startTime=(+\S+)\s+endTime=(\S+)/)" input_file > toto.xxx

    And it tells me :

    c:\>perl -ne "print qq/$1 $2 $3\n/ if (/Turn.*?speaker=(\S+)\s+startTi
+me=(+\S+)\
s+endTime=(\S+)/)" C1_A1_1a.trs > toto.xxx
Quantifier follows nothing in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/Turn.*?sp
+eaker=(\S+
)\s+startTime=(+ <-- HERE \S+)\s+endTime=(\S+)/ at -e line 1.

    [download]

    The file toto.xxx is created, but empty. I hardly understand what I am doing but I am in an effort to.

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[d/l]
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      I observe that your copy/paste skills and/or typing skills have come up short. There's a stray + in (+\S+) (i.e., the first one.) The error message even points it out for you :)

      -QM
      --
      Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

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[d/l]
[select]
        OK ,I could have done that better... but understand me, when you look at this all for the first time, even reading is challenging. Anyway, I thank you all very much, it works flawlessly now. I will probably come back soon to annoy you again. Cheers monks!
[reply]
        if not using download code, and code settings are that code is wrapped (probably noob default), then that explains extra + --- anonymous monk get code wrapping (with the + + + + + + +)
[reply]
      How did the + get after the (?
      لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ
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[d/l]

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