Hi monks -- longtime listener; first time caller. I just tried this one over at StackOverflow but the one responder apparently got upset when I suggested his quite nice solution wasn't right for my situation -- and deleted his own answer and all comments! His ball and he's going home! Oh well.

So. I've got big files of hand-entered data in various formats that needs cleaning and rearranging; the current one looks like this: 

C31 6  3 2.4 1.5 2.6  
C32 2  7 3 1.0  
H31 1 1 0 21.0 11.2 5.3 1.4
T11 2  1 0 6.0 1.1 2.2
L06 1  1 0 1.0 3.3
L06 1  4 0 1.1 1.8

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That first line is bad -- missing its fourth field, which should be [0-3]; all sorts of typo-like errors like that. Catch those, send them to the Bad file, cut up good lines into a hash for redistribution. I've got this one matched like so: 

($t, $p, $s, $d) = (/^([A-Z]\d\d) +(1?\d) +(\d?\d(?:\.1)?) +([0-3]) /)
+ 
  or ($bad{$line++} = $_) && next;
@cts = ($' =~ /(\d?\d\.\d)/g);

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That works but I'd really like to do it in a single pattern so I can simply swap patterns for the many differently similar files still to come. I couldn't figure out anything for this that would do both the careful pattern matching and the variable-length lines all in one go (It's easy to catch every field with just /(\S+)\s+/g but then I have to check each catch separately for its proper form, which makes it messy when I retool the script for the next stinking input file).

At this point I'm mainly interested in the theoretico-mechanical question of whether what I want is *possible*. Can you do a match like 

@allFields = (/patt1 patt2 patt3 patt19+/);

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where the first three patts each occur once and patt19 occurs {1,n} times, you validate all catches with picky matching or next, and however many patt19s there are in a given line everything winds up in @allFields? Everything I tried got the first three fields and either the first patt19 or the last but I could never get them all.

Thanks!

In reply to validate variable-length lines in one regex? by uhClem

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