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

I have a script that reads a file one line at a time and searches for "--foo" and print's everything after that. I have that part working fine, but, when it prints the output it has everything on the line after --foo
At the end of the line in the file is a TAB followed by a \
I Think that I need to use a regular expression to tell it to ignore the TAB \ but I'm not sure exactly how to word it as I'm new to this. Also, the output is in quoted (") text and I would like to strip off the quotes around the text.
Is regex what I want to use?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Regex question
by monkfish (Pilgrim) on Nov 14, 2001 at 22:47 UTC
    If you don't want to print a line with a tab and a slash put this in your loop...

    print $_ unless ($_ =~ m@^\t\\$@);

    If you want to stop printing when you get to a line like that you could use:

    last if ($_ =~ m@^\t\\$@);

    Edit Changed / to \\

    -monkfish (The Fishy Monk)

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Re: Regex question
by jeroenes (Priest) on Nov 14, 2001 at 23:28 UTC
    If the tab and the '\' are always at the end of a line, you can use the lvalue of substr: 
    substr($line,-3,2)=''; #assuming your line ends with a newline
$line =~ tr/"//d;  #deletes all quotes in your text

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    If you want to take care of nested quotes, take a look at Parse::RecDescent or the likes.

    Cheers,

    Jeroen

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Re: Regex question
by c (Hermit) on Nov 14, 2001 at 23:37 UTC
    one other path you may want to head down is getting rid of your tab and following slash using the s/// operator:

    my $string = "hello\t\\";
$string =~ s/\t\\//g;

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    this should return the value of $string as simply hello

    humbly -c

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Re: Regex question
by atlantageek (Monk) on Nov 15, 2001 at 09:47 UTC
    Regex will work assumming that the content is in $line 
    $line =~ /"(.*)\t\\"/;

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    I always wanted to be somebody... I guess I should have been more specific.
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      and also use $1 now for your value.
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