In your sample input there is no space between 0 and ]. In your regular expression you have the pattern .* ] (there's a space). Did you maybe need to put a /x modifier? Or eliminate that space in the pattern.

Also, this line: my $subst = // is not doing what you think. It is doing a match of $_ =~ // in scalar context and assigning the Boolean result to $subst. I think you probably wanted my $subst = '';, or my $subst = q//;.

... my $subst = // is not doing what you think. It is doing a match of $_ =~ // in scalar context ...

Likewise
    my $regex =/\{\[%tqu .* ]}/;


OldChamp: You seem to have warnings enabled, but if so, you should have posted the warning messages generated.

---

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

Hi Dave, thank you for your help. I have removed the space and I have corrected the $subst to my $subst ='';, but I still get an empty file Out.txt.

I'm just learning perl, I have programed in Visual Basic and VBA long long ago.

but I still get an empty file Out.txt.

You should print if you want your program to produce some output.

The main problem is in your regex declaration, you had / in there and it was being read as a regex and throwing errors about $regex not being initiated. as s//$regex///$subst//gi I think. Here is the error I was getting:

Use of uninitialized value $_ in pattern match (m//) at C:\User.....
[download]

Heres a solution I came up with:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $regex = '\{\[%tqu.*]}';
my $subst = '';

while(my $line = <DATA>) 
{
    $line =~ s/$regex/$subst/gi;
    print $line."\n";
}

__DATA__
1. Ka6 ({Of course not} 1. b6 $2 Kb7 $11) 1... Kb8 (1... f4 2. b6 $18)
+ {[%tqu "What is  White's next move?","","",g3,"",0,b6,"misses the wi
+n:",0]} 2. g3 $1 13. g6 c3
[download]

Outputs:

1. Ka6 ({Of course not} 1. b6 $2 Kb7 $11) 1... Kb8 (1... f4 2. b6 $18)
+  2. g3 $1 13. g6 c3
[download]

Hi James, thank you for your quick help. I've tried your solution and it works. I'm new to perl, so in this first attempt I have only used a tiny bit of the real data. So I have modified your solution a little bit to be able to work with an inputfile and an outputfile.

The modified code is

# Aufruf: perl removeEK1.pl TestEK.txt > Out.txt

use strict;
use warnings;

my $regex = '\{\[%tqu.*]}';
my $subst = '';

while(<>) 
{
    my $line =$_;
    $line =~ s/$regex/$subst/gi;
    print $line;
}
[download]

That worked fine with the following file TestEK.txt:

[Event "?"]
[Site "?"]
[Date "1985.??.??"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Neuenschwander, Beat"]
[Black "?"]
[Result "1-0"]
[Annotator "Solution"]
[SetUp "1"]
[FEN "8/5ppk/8/3p2KP/3P2P1/8/8/8 w - - 0 1"]
[PlyCount "17"]
[Source "ChessCafe/CB"]
[SourceDate "2003.10.29"]

BlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBla 
1. Ka6 ({Of course not} 1. b6 $2 Kb7 $11) 1... Kb8 (1... f4 2. b6 $18)
+ {[%tqu "What is  White's next move?","","",g3,"",0,b6,"misses the wi
+n:",0]} 2. g3 $1 13. g6 c3
BlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBla
1. Ka6 ({Of course not} 1. b6 $2 Kb7 $11) 1... Kb8 (1... f4 2. b6 $18)
+ {[%tqu "What is  White's next move?","","",g3,"",0,b6,"misses the wi
+n:",0]} 2. g3 $1 13. g6 c31. Ka6 ({Of course not} 1. b6 $2 Kb7 $11) 1
+... Kb8 (1... f4 2. b6 $18) {[%tqu "What is  White's next move?","","
+",g3,"",0,b6,"misses the win:",0]} 2. g3 $1 13. g6 c31. Ka6 ({Of cour
+se not} 1. b6 $2 Kb7 $11) 1... Kb8 (1... f4 2. b6 $18) {[%tqu "What i
+s  White's next move?","","",g3,"",0,b6,"misses the win:",0]} 2. g3 $
+1 13. g6 c3
1. Ka6 ({Of course not} 1. b6 $2 Kb7 $11) 1... Kb8 (1... f4 2. b6 $18)
+ {[%tqu "What is  White's next move?","","",g3,"",0,b6,"misses the wi
+n:",0]} 2. g3 $1 13. g6 c3
BlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBla
BlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBla
BlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaB
+laBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBlaBla
[download]

I got the output I wanted, but when I tested it with a part of my real inputfile, it failed.

 
.......

[Event "?"]
[Site "?"]
[Date "1933.??.??"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Grigoriev, Nikolay"]
[Black "?"]
[Result "*"]
[Annotator "Solution"]
[SetUp "1"]
[FEN "k7/2p5/8/KP3p2/8/8/6P1/8 w - - 0 1"]
[PlyCount "13"]
[Source "ChessCafe/CB"]
[SourceDate "2003.10.29"]

 1. Ka6 ({Of
course not} 1. b6 $2 Kb7 $11) 1... Kb8 (1... f4 2. b6 $18) {[%tqu "Wha
+t is
White's next move?","","",g3,"",0,b6,"misses the win:",0]} 2. g3 $1 ({
+The hasty
} 2. b6 $2 {misses the win:} Kc8 $1 {with the idea 3...cxb6.} 3. b7+ K
+b8 4. g3
c5 5. Kb5 Kxb7 6. Kxc5 Kc7 7. Kd5 f4 $1 8. gxf4 Kd7 $11 {Black saves t
+he game
by seizing the opposition.}) 2... Ka8 ({Another defensive method also 
+does not
help} 2... Kc8 3. Ka7 Kd8 4. Kb8 $1 {(an opposition!)} Kd7 5. Kb7 Kd8 
+(5... Kd6
6. Kc8 $18) 6. Kc6 {(an outflanking!)} Kc8 7. Kd5 Kb7 8. Ke5 Kb6 9. Kx
+f5 Kxb5
10. g4 c5 11. g5 c4 12. Ke4 $1 {(we shall see this method - an enticem
+ent of
the hostile king under a check - more than once in this book)} Kb4 13.
+ g6 c3
14. Kd3 $1 Kb3 15. g7 c2 16. g8=Q+) {[%tqu "What is White's next move?
+","","",
b6,"",0]} 3. b6 Kb8 {
} 4. Kb5 $1 (4. b7 $2 c5 5. Kb5 Kxb7 $11) 4... Kb7 5. bxc7 Kxc7 {[%tqu
+ "What is White's next move?",
"","",Kc5,"",0]} 6. Kc5 Kd7 {[%tqu "What is White's next move?","","",
+Kd5,
"This time White has seized the opposition, therefore the pawn sacrifi
+ce 7...
f4 is senseless.",0]} 7. Kd5 $18 {This time White has seized the oppos
+ition,
therefore the pawn sacrifice 7...f4 is senseless.} *

[Event "?"]
[Site "?"]

.......
[download]

My outputfile now was the same as the inputfile, the searchtext was not removed!! While in my first attempt I made relatively simple errors, now I think it's difficult and I'm not able to spot what is going wrong. Pherhaps you have an idea?

In your TestEK.txt file, you have all  {[%tqu ... ]} sequences on the same line. In the second, real file, these sequences span two or more lines.

You are processing the file line-by-line and matching your regex against each line, so if a  {[%tqu ... ]} sequence spans multiple lines, the regex will never see it.

If the file is small, less than, say, several hundred megabytes and never likely to grow larger, it might be easiest to "slurp" the entire file at once as a string into a scalar variable and then do a single  s/// against the variable, then write the string back out to the new file.
    my $string = do { local $/;  <>; };
    $string =~ s/$regex/$subst/gis;
    print $string;
(untested). Note that the  s/// now needs a  /s regex modifier so that  . (dot) in  .* will match a newline across multiple lines. Get rid of the while-loop entirely.

Update: See also File::Slurp.

Update 2: Here's a test:

c:\@Work\Perl\monks\OldChamp>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s = do { local $/;  <>; };
 print qq{[[$s]] \n};
 ;;
 my $rx = '{\[%tqu.*]}';
 my $su = '';
 $s =~ s/$rx/$su/gis;
 print qq{[[$s]]};
"  tqu.txt
[[keep this {[%tqu get
rid of
this]} and
keep this too
]]

[[keep this  and
keep this too
]]
[download]

Update 3: Update 2 contains a rookie mistake: using greedy  .* instead of the lazy  .*? version. Here's a version that will actually work with a single long string. The previous version would delete everything between the absolute first  {[%tqu and the absolute last  ]} sequence in the file.

c:\@Work\Perl\monks\OldChamp>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s = do { local $/;  <>; };
 print qq{[[$s]] \n};
 ;;
 my $rx = '{\[%tqu.*?]}';
 my $su = '';
 $s =~ s/$rx/$su/gis;
 print qq{[[$s]]};
"  tqu.txt
[[keep this {[%tqu get
rid of
this]} and
keep this too
keep {[%tqu but
dump
also ]} it
to here.
]]

[[keep this  and
keep this too
keep  it
to here.
]]
[download]

Actually, something like
    my $regex = qr{ {\[%tqu [^\]]* ]} }xms;
might even be preferable as long as there are guaranteed to be no  ] (right-square-bracket) characters in the sub-strings to be removed, but let's leave it at that for now.

---

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<