OK, seeing as I am 57 in a few months, looks like a lot of people are protecting me ;)

Here follows 2 examples of the junk I need to format:

SWA vs CHE GK
WBA @ BOU GK
[download]

That is easy to parse and render clean, as all I need is to extract is "SWA,GK" or "WBA,GK" in that example:

   $line =~ s/ vs ... /,/;
   $line =~ s/ \@ ... /,/;
[download]

Now, the 'vs' and '@' are (seem) randomly dispersed ~ whether that is a product of the newspapers website database or crappy programming, I don't know.

But this week, this appeared in about 50 places over 4000 lines:

EVE GK
[download]

OK, my code failed on this. I could see what has happened, but couldn't fix it at work. If I did have a debug option to pass over a new regex, I could send a '$line =~ s/ GK/,GK/;' which would have fixed it up until I got home (as it was, I frigged around in a spreadsheet to correct it to keep the wolves at bay).

Nick

Are those full lines? I mean, is this a situation where you can just grab the first and last non-whitespace chars, and just not bother with the stuff in between? ie. does the below code work in your cases, or are there other things that need consideration?

use warnings;
use strict;

while (<DATA>){
    if (/^(\w+).*\s(\w+)/){
        my $line = "$1,$2";
        print "$line\n";
    }
}

__DATA__
SWA vs CHE GK
WBA @ BOU GK
EVE GK
EVE 4 87 dwqer *** GK
[download]

Output:

SWA,GK
WBA,GK
EVE,GK
EVE,GK
[download]

"Are those full lines?"

I wish, that is one little line... in that format - there are between 5 to 10 for each player that changes randomly, and remember, the data copied 'n' pasted changes quiet a lot on the fly depending on games/injuries/banned/transfers- that is the issue. So I need a way to get new subsititions in for a temporary measure until I can re-code the code when I get home.

Nick