Help with regex

reaper9187 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello dear monks, I'm back here to seek your guidance and help with regexes. Basically, I'm parsing through an excel file that has whole database of entries as a table. Now, the table has headers corresponding to every column like so :

"Header 1"  "Header 2(%)"  "header 3 " ......
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I need to read through the columns matching these keywords. The catch here is that keywords will be the same, but it may or may not include special characters, upper/lowercase characters,whitespaces in the header.

So, if my keywords are "header1", "header2", and so on,....the regex should be able to identify all possible combinations of the keyword with variations as mentioned above.

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Re: Help with regex by hdb (Monsignor) on Sep 19, 2014 at 06:00 UTC
Remove all non-letter and non-digit characters from your header and then do a case-insensitive comparison. Something like `$header =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9]//g; if( $header =~ /header1\|header2/i ) { ...` [download] UPDATE: changed /I to /i	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Help with regex by GrandFather (Saint) on Sep 19, 2014 at 06:49 UTC
I thought Excel exported stuff as CSV files so the way to "parse" the data is to use Text::xSV or one of the other CSV munging modules in CPAN designed for exactly that purpose. Perl is the programming world's equivalent of English	[reply]
Re: Help with regex by biohisham (Priest) on Sep 19, 2014 at 05:46 UTC
Are those headers enclosed in double quotes ? How many headers are there ? Also it is not clear what delimiters between fields your excel file has but that information will be relevant when thinking about constructing a regex, table files can be comma-separated, tab separated, space-separated ..etc. Are you reading your file one line at a time ? It maybe useful to give a snippet of the code you tried to solve this problem and also a few lines of your file to see how they look like. A 4 year old monk	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Help with regex by reaper9187 (Scribe) on Sep 19, 2014 at 06:09 UTC
Thank you hdb. Thats just what i needed. I'm sorry biohisham is I wasn't clear enough. but i've got the solution now. Thanks and appreaciate your help	[reply]