Hello sp4rperl, and welcome to the Monastery!

To elaborate a little on tybalt89’s answer: By declaring $endTime with my, you make it a lexical variable whose scope is limited to the enclosing block. So when the print statement is reached, $endTime no longer refers to that lexical variable, but rather to an (undeclared) package global of the same name. If you begin your script with:

use strict;

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then Perl will give you an error message describing the problem. It’s also a very good idea to add:

use warnings;

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to the top of every script. Note also that the /g modifiers on your regular expressions do nothing useful (Update: thanks to AnomalousMonk for the correction below), as in each case you’re looking for a single match only. And you need only one regular expression for the endTime match:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $timeLimit = '<timeLimit endTime="2016-12-28T23:59:59" startTime="2
+016-09-30T00:00:00"></timeLimit>'; 
my ($startTime) = $timeLimit =~ /startTime="(.*?)"/;
chomp($startTime);

if (my ($endTime) = $timeLimit =~ /endTime="(.*?)"/) 
{
    chomp($endTime); 
    print "[$startTime],[$endTime]\n";
}
else
{
    print "[$startTime]\n";
}

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(I’m assuming that chomp($timeLimit); is a mistake for chomp($startTime);.)

Hope that helps,

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

In reply to Re: Pattern matching and deriving the data between the "(double quotes) in HTML tag by Athanasius
in thread Pattern matching and deriving the data between the "(double quotes) in HTML tag by sp4rperl

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