in reply to Print unless behaving strangely

There could be a non-printing character before the comma that is causing your match to fail; I inserted a NULL which doesn't show up when you print the line. You can inspect each character using split along with ord and sprintf inside a map, printing the ordinal value of each using say.

$ perl -E '
$_ = qq{PID: \0, VID: 255, SN: AGM163923J5};
say;
say for map {sprintf q{0x%02x}, ord } split m{};'
PID: , VID: 255, SN: AGM163923J5
0x50
0x49
0x44
0x3a
0x20
0x00   <-- the unseen NULL
0x2c
0x20
0x56
0x49
0x44
0x3a
0x20
0x32
0x35
0x35
0x2c
0x20
0x53
0x4e
0x3a
0x20
0x41
0x47
0x4d
0x31
0x36
0x33
0x39
0x32
0x33
0x4a
0x35
$

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I hope this is helpful.

Cheers,

JohnGG

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Re^2: Print unless behaving strangely
by LanX (Saint) on Jun 01, 2014 at 22:59 UTC
    this or any other "invisible" problem could also be visualized with Data::Dump 

    use Data::Dump;

$_ = qq{PID: \0, VID: 255, SN: AGM163923J5};
dd $_;

    [download]

    "PID: \0, VID: 255, SN: AGM163923J5"

    Cheers Rolf

    ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

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[d/l]
[select]

      Thanks for all the replies, I will try to answer them all

      Yes I did mean "$_ contains the value 'PID: , VID: 255, SN: AGM163923J5". So this wasn't a section of the perl code. I am reading a file and it is at this line that strangeness happens.

      Yes I am using Strict and Warnings

      I have put the output direct from the Cisco CLI through a Hex translator and there doesn't seem to be any hidden/null characters

      PID: , VID:

      0x500x490x440x3a0x200x2c0x200x560x490x440x3a

      but the output from the file perl is holding the string in does have extra characters.

      0x500x490x440x3a 0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x7f0x2c 0x560x490x440x3a

      Thanks for all your help

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