Hello again everyone!

I always end up finding myself coming straight back to PerlMonks when I'm stumped because everyone is always so helpful!

Right now I'm attempting to analyze a text file. This text file (I will give an example) with multiple "sections" divided by "\n" characters. These sections contain a bunch of data I don't care about, but there a few lines that I need to grab. Here is where my problem lies.

Example Text File

First Name: John
Last Name: Doe
Occupation: Network Administrator
Location: West Coast

First Name: Jane
Last Name: Doe
Occupation: Human Resources
Location: East Coast

First Name: James
Last Name: Doe
Occupation: Technical Support Engineer
Location: Central USA

[download]

I have been trying to use regex to search for a string, for example "Central USA" and then use that to match the "First Name" and "Last Name" lines and CAPTURE their names.

I attempted to use a regex "lookbehind" but I can't do that since my capture has to be variable in length. I believe this is because I don't know the length of the first or last name and I have to account for that. I have been attempting to use http://regexstorm.net/tester to accomplish this.

When I don't use a lookbehind, my regex search picks up the first "First Name" and "Last Name" line in the file regardless of if it is near where I matched the "Location" field. This makes sense, but I want it to grab the "First Name" and "Last Name" line that came right before "Central USA".

Should I be going at this a different way?

Example Code

if ($line =~ /First Name:\s+([A-Za-z0-9 _ ( )]*).*?Last Name:\s+([A-Za
+-z0-9 _ ( )]*).*?Location: Central USA/s) {
     print $line;
}

[download]

As always, any help would be greatly appreciated!

In reply to Storing String from Line Before Regex Match by Nico

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