Caputre Entire Line Not Just Find

jlope043 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello All, I am trying to get my script to capture the entire line of my find (header piece) and not just the find characters (first two characters in $find). I have tried many variations and still come up with nothing that works. Any help would be great!

use strict;
use warnings;

my $find = '^(H0|HT)';
my $header;

open (NEW, ">", "OUTPUTTEST.txt" ) or die "could not open:$!";
open (FILE, "<", "NEWFILETEST.txt") or die "could not open:$!";

while (<FILE>) {
    if (/($find)/) {
        $header = $1;
} elsif (/^\s{38}\S*/) {
    print NEW "$header\t", $_;
    }
}
close (FILE);
close (NEW)
[download]

input file

HT00000000
     NOTE1
     NOTE2
     NOTE3
[download]

current output file


HT     NOTE1
HT     NOTE2
HT     NOTE3
[download]

expected output file


HT00000000     NOTE1
HT00000000     NOTE2
HT00000000     NOTE3
[download]

Comment on Caputre Entire Line Not Just Find Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Caputre Entire Line Not Just Find by kennethk (Abbot) on Jul 13, 2016 at 16:32 UTC
If you want to grab everything via capture, you'll need to match everything: `while (<FILE>) { if (/(.$find.)/) { $header = $1; } elsif (/^\s{38}\S*/) { print NEW "$header\t", $_; } }` [download] Note that `.` matches every character but a newline, so there's no need to worry about chomping. See s in Modifiers in perlre. #11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Caputre Entire Line Not Just Find by jlope043 (Acolyte) on Jul 13, 2016 at 16:41 UTC
Thank you kennethk, this is exactly what I was trying to accomplish. Truly appreciated.	[reply]
Re: Caputre Entire Line Not Just Find by Eily (Monsignor) on Jul 13, 2016 at 16:31 UTC
`while(<HANDLE>)` sets the special variable $_ to the current line on each iteration (and /$find/ is applied on $_ by default. `$str =~ /$find/` would apply it on $str). So `$header = $_;` should do what you need, although a chomp may be required.	[reply] [d/l] [select]