Hello davidfilmer,

Here's my demonstrator program, which works properly

It will work properly only as long as you have no more than one configuration/memory/serial_no dataset in the file. As soon as you add a second set, the regex fails:

#! perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = join("\n", <DATA>);     # slurp it all into a string with
+ newlines

my ($configuration, $memory, $serial_number) =
    $string =~ /System Configuration:\s+([\w\s]*?)\n.*Memory size:\s+(
+\d+).*Chassis Serial Number\W+(\w+)/s;

print "System Configuration: '$configuration'\n",
      "Memory Size:          '$memory'\n",
      "Serial Number:        '$serial_number'\n\n";

__DATA__
============================ FW Version 1 ============================
System Configuration: Oracle Corporation sun4v SPARC Enterprise T5220
Memory size: 65408 Megabytes
Version
------------------------------------------------------------
 Sun System Firmware 7.4.7 2014/01/14 18:48
====================== System PROM revisions =======================
Version
------------------------------------------------------------
OBP 4.33.6.e 2014/01/14 15:19
Chassis Serial Number
---------------------
FDL10792DE
============================ FW Version 2 ============================
System Configuration: Oracle Corporation sun4v SPARC Enterprise T5221
Memory size: 65409 Megabytes
Version
------------------------------------------------------------
 Sun System Firmware 7.4.7 2014/01/14 18:48
====================== System PROM revisions =======================
Version
------------------------------------------------------------
OBP 4.33.6.e 2014/01/14 15:19
Chassis Serial Number
---------------------
abcdefg

[download]

Output:

17:45 >perl 1379_SoPW.pl
System Configuration: 'Oracle Corporation sun4v SPARC Enterprise T5220
+'
Memory Size:          '65409'
Serial Number:        'abcdefg'


17:45 >

[download]

That’s because there are two occurrences of .* in the regex which are greedy, but need to be made non-greedy: .*?

BTW, why don’t you use warnings? Also, why are you adding an extra newline to the end of each line of input data? Simply joining on the empty string would make $string contain the same data as in the file. But the usual Perl idiom for slurping is this (which is simpler):

my $string = do { local $/; <DATA>; };

[download]

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

In reply to Re^3: Break a long regex across multiple lines of code, with comments by Athanasius
in thread Break a long regex across multiple lines of code, with comments by davidfilmer

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