in reply to Regex get Text between two strings with colon

Brother haukex has already replied, but here's my answer, which more or less does the same thing:

#!perl use strict; use warnings; { # Disable the line ending magic, and slurp the entire string into # a scalar. undef $/; my $data = <DATA>; # If we see some text between 'Test:' and 'Test2:' while looking # at a multi-line string, display the resulting capture. if ( $data =~ /Test:(.+)Test2:/s ) { print "Found |$1| between titles.\n" } } __DATA__ Test: Blah blah blah 1 Blah blah blah 2 Blah blah blah 5 Blah blah blah 9 Test2: What is this for? How is this happning? Why am I here? Hello3: What
The $/ variable is the one that tells Perl what the 'end of line' character is. When I undef that variable, the whole file gets treated as a single line from an input point of view when I read the text into that variable.

The 's' option defines the regexp as a multi-line regexp, telling it to ignore the carriage return (\r) and line feed (\n) characters. When this script is run, I get

Found | Blah blah blah 1 Blah blah blah 2 Blah blah blah 5 Blah blah blah 9 | between titles.

That's one way of parsing the file -- another way would be to

You could also just capture each block of text into an array, store that array as a hash value, using the label (like Test) as the hash key. Later, just go and get the entry for whichever key you want.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

Thanks PJ. We owe you so much. Groklaw -- RIP -- 2003 to 2013.

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Re^2: Regex get Text between two strings with colon
by MurciaNew (Novice) on Sep 16, 2017 at 19:12 UTC
    Thanks for hints. Is there a Solution without modifiers and slurps? Just "pure" regex?

      As the Anonymous One has said, modifiers are an entirely kosher part of regexes, and haukex has already linked to a discussion of non-slurping, line-by-line matching.


      Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

      modifiers are "pure regex".

      and if you don't want to slurp, then how do you expect a regex to match over data you haven't read?