The DATA handle can be read using: <DATA> ...the point being that it's not <_DATA_>, it's <DATA>. Then at the end of your script, it is not _DATA_ (with a single underscore on either side), it's __DATA__, with two underscores on each side. At first I thought maybe you just made a typo, but I'm seeing you do it repeatedly, so it's worth mentioning.

As for decoding the JSON first, YES. It doesn't need to be a pattern matching problem (which is almost always much more difficult than people expect) when there are perfectly good JSON parsing modules that will return a structure that you can simply traverse, iterate over, or manipulate however you wish, easily.

Here's how I would start: 

use strict;
use warnings;

use JSON;
use Data::Dumper;

my $j = JSON->new;
my $structure = $j->decode( do { local $/ = undef; <DATA> } );
print Dumper $structure;

__DATA__
JSON here.....

[download]

Then after getting a look at how my data is structured, I could plan how I want to work with it.

If JSON and JSON::XS seem to heavy for you, try JSON::Tiny, in which case: my $structure = JSON::Tiny->new->decode( ..... );


Dave

In reply to Re^3: Help extracting pattern of data by davido
in thread Help extracting pattern of data by spikeinc

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