Let me, however, continue with my earlier idea and show how split could be used in such a case. The following is a demonstration under the Perl debugger:

  DB<1> $string = '<Answer type="string">ServerName.FD.net.org</Answer
+>';

  DB<2> @fields = split /[<>]/, $string;

  DB<3> x @fields;      # displaying the content of the @fields array 
+after the split
0  ''
1  'Answer type="string"'
2  'ServerName.FD.net.org'
3  '/Answer'
  DB<4> print $fields[2];   # outputting the server name
ServerName.FD.net.org
[download]

  DB<1> $string = '<Answer type="string">ServerName.FD.net.org</Answer
+>';

  DB<2> $name = (split /[<>]/, $string)[2];

  DB<3> print $name;
ServerName.FD.net.org
[download]

Hi Laurent, I think I understand what you are explaining to me but would not know how to incorporate your example into the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

my $count = 0;
my $namefile = $ARGV[0] || 'names.txt'; # default if no argument
# names.txt
#ServerName1
#ServerName2

# get list of computers to search for
my @computers;
open FILE,'<',$namefile or die "Could not open $namefile : $!";
while (<FILE>){
  chomp;
  s/^\s+|\s+$//g; # trim spaces
  next unless /\S/; # skip blank lines
  push @computers,$_;
}
close FILE; 

my $file = "computernames.txt";
# computernames.txt
#<Answer type="string">ServerName1.FD.net.org</Answer>
#<Answer type="string">ServerName2.FD.net.org</Answer>
#<Answer type="string">ServerName3.FD.net.org</Answer>

# search text file
open IN, '<',$file or die "Could not open $file : $!";
while (my $line = <IN>){
  # repeat line search for each computer
  foreach my $search (@computers) {
    if ( my ($name) = $line =~ /($search[\.\w]*)/ ){
      print "Name ; $name\n";
      ++$count;
    } 
  }
}
close IN;

# result
if ($count){
  print "$count matches\n";
} else {
  print "No matches found\n";
}
[download]

Thanks, Tony

Hi Tony,

this is an example of how you could do it, by modifying your second while loop (untested):

while (my $line = <IN>){
  my $server_name = (split /[<>]/, $line)[2];
  foreach my $search (@computers) {
    print "Name ; $server_name\n" if $search eq $server_name;
  }
}
[download]

Please note, however, that using a hash, rather than an array, for storing the computers would certainly be more efficient (especially if you have a lot of data).

Change the first part of the script as follows:

my %computers;
open FILE, '<', $namefile or die "Could not open $namefile : $!";
while (<FILE>){
  chomp;
  s/^\s+|\s+$//g; # trim spaces
  next unless /\S/; # skip blank lines
  $computers{$_} = 1;
}
close FILE;
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Then change the second while loop as follows:

while (my $line = <IN>){
    my $server_name = (split /[<>]/, $line)[2];
    print "Name ; $server_name\n" if exists $computers{$server_name};
}
[download]

The point is that a hash lookup (in %computers) is usually much faster than traversing a full array (@computers) every time.