How can I remove unwated parts of a string in a pattern match?

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

Hi fellow Monks!
I am running a pattern match string, in order to look for substrings like:

weight gain
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in strings like:

4;T;X;15;O20;O26.0;O26.0;O260;Excessive weight gain in pregnancy;242;U
+NDEF;UNDEF;2-067;1-089
4;T;X;15;O20;O26.1;O26.1;O261;Low weight gain in pregnancy;242;UNDEF;U
+NDEF;2-067;1-089
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Performing the pattern match is easy of course, just by:

if($big_string=~/$small_string/) {print "Found match\n";}
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however, I seem to not be able to do exactly what I need, and that is that I would like to keep only:

Excessive weight gain in pregnancy
Low weight gain in pregnancy
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from the afore-mentioned "big strings". any hints on how to do that?

Comment on How can I remove unwated parts of a string in a pattern match? Select or Download Code

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Re: How can I remove unwated parts of a string in a pattern match? by choroba (Cardinal) on Dec 14, 2015 at 11:58 UTC
If no quoting and escaping is involved, you can just split on semicolon: `#! /usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; my @strings = ('4;T;X;15;O20;O26.0;O26.0;O260;Excessive weight gain in + pregnancy;242;UNDEF;UNDEF;2-067;1-089', '4;T;X;15;O20;O26.1;O26.1;O261;Low weight gain in pregn +ancy;242;UNDEF;UNDEF;2-067;1-089'); for my $string (@strings) { my $text = (split /;/, $string)[8]; print $text, "\n" if $text =~ /weight gain/; }` [download] Otherwise, see Text::CSV. ($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-\|\|-\|5+lengthSq)`"S\|oS2"`map{chr \|+ord }map{substrSq`S_+\|`\|}3E\|-\|`7**2-3:)=~y+S\|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a, [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How can I remove unwated parts of a string in a pattern match? by Anonymous Monk on Dec 14, 2015 at 12:37 UTC
Got it! I ran: `if($ig_string=~/.\;(.?$small_string.*?)\;/)` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: How can I remove unwated parts of a string in a pattern match? by Laurent_R (Canon) on Dec 14, 2015 at 18:50 UTC
Hi, although your regex most probably works fine, the initial part (`.`) is useless if you can describe better what* you want to match, and the semi-colons don't need to be escaped. You could consider something like this: `if ($big_string =~ /;([\w ]+$small_string[\w ]+);/)` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]