Hello Magnanimous Monks,

I am attempting to rewrite some Bash scripts that use a lot of awk pipes into Perl. I am looking for the best way to read in information from a repetitive text file. The text file looks something like this:

Some Field   : some value
Another Field: 1234
Different One: 5678
Yet Another  : foo
.
.
.

[download]

etc...

And then the "pattern" repeats (many times) in the text file. The end result is to print it all out in neat columns with headers at the top, something like:

something   number1   number2   word
some value    1234    5678       foo
some else     4321    8765       bar

[download]

I started out putting the whole text into an array and grepping out what I want, put that was quickly becoming very messy. My second attempt is trying to extract multiple lines using the method:

while(<>){
    if ( /Some Field/ ... /Yet Another/ ) {
        push (@array, $_);
        #do something with the info...
    }
}

[download]

I found my self wanting to then put it into an array as above but that will most likely end up being the same messy situation.

I would greatly appreciate any ideas or suggestions about an easy way to extract the bits of info that I want and print them out into the desire column format (using sprintf I reckon). Also as a side note, the Perl will need to be somewhat portable (i.e. it'll run under Windows, Linux, and OSX OS's).

Thanks in advance!

In reply to Extracting and manipulating a range of lines by joeymac

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