Hi, mostly a perl noob here but trying! I've hacked my way through a few things but I'm really hitting a wall with this one.

I'm trying to take some data in the format such as:

# hostname 123
hostname 123
vlan create vif1 1 2 3 4 5 6
vlan add vif1 7 8 
ifconfig vif1-1 some data here
ifconfig vif1-2 some data here
..
ifconfig vif1-9 some data here
# hostname 456
hostname 456
vlan create vif5 1 2
vlan add vif5 3 4 5
vlan add vif5 6 7 8 9
ifconfig vif5-1 some data here
ifconfig vif5-2 some data here
..
ifconifg vif5-9 some data here
[download]

I have read this data into an array and split it on "#" by doing the following:

$/ = undef;
while ( <DATA> )
        { 
        @col=split('#',$_);
        $/ = \n;
[download]

I'm able to iterate through the array and find the lines I want correctly with this

foreach (@col) {
        print "This is element : $i\n";
        
        if (/vlan/) {
        print "found a vlan line\n";
        }
        if (/ifconfig/) {
        print "found an ifconfig line\n";
[download]

1. The first problem I'm having is the if lines above doesn't let me match on /^hostname/ instead of /hostname/. Thus I get false positives because hostname exists in other places when I only want to match lines that have hostname at the start.

2. When I match the vlan lines, what I want to do is count the # of words on the line (unix "wc"), read any other vlan lines thats in the current element of the array, and add this to get a total. The total # of vlans will always be the number of words on each line that starts with vlan, less 3 (for each line). For the first element above, I have 8 total vlans I need to read and then compare with the number of ifconfig lines to make sure they match.

The end goal is to count the # of vlans created and/or added and compare with the ifconfig lines to make sure if one creates 9 vlans, then there are 9 match ifconfig lines.

3. Output desired:

Hostname :  hostname123
# of vlans:  8
# of ifconfig lines: 8

Hostname : hostname456
# of vlans: 9
# of ifconfig lines: 9
[download]

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.