Hi everyone. I'm fairly new to Perl and am trying to extract a specific chapter from a text file. In the example below, I would like to retrieve the text from Chapter 2.
Table of Contents Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Main Chapter 3. Conclusion ============================== Chapter 1. Introduction This is the introduction preceding Chapter 2. Chapter 2. Main This is the text contained in Chapter 2 and will contain a lot of text + with at least 100 words and probably somewhere around 1000-5000. Chapter 3. Conclusion This is the conclusion.
The Perl script should extract "This is the text contained in Chapter 2 and will contain a lot of text with at least 100 words and probably somewhere around 1000-5000." from the file and write the output to a new file. Unfortunately, the code below only gives me the first matches, i.e. the text from the table of contents.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w #use strict; my $startstring='Chapter\s2\.\sMain'; my $endstring='Chapter\s3\.\sConclusion'; { local $/; open (SLURP, "C:\\Text\\1.txt") or die $!; $data = <SLURP>; close SLURP or die $!; { @finds=$data=~m/($startstring.*?$endstring)/ismo; } open my $OUTFILE, ">", "C:\\Text\\Chapter2\\1.txt" or die $!; print $OUTFILE "@finds"; close $OUTFILE; }
Is there a way to refine my search function so it works as I would like it to? Like including a rule where the startstring must be skipped if the preceding 5 strings contains "Chapter 1. Introduction" and/or the output should contain at least 100 words? Thanks in advance! :)

In reply to Extracting a chapter from text file by jwkuo87

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