I'm a perl-novice... trying to expand my perl knowledge
beyond system administration. I have an anti-virus log file that I would like to eventually put into a mysql database; but I'm having problems parsing it. The log file is a large flat file with "----" lines as record seperators. Here's an example...

From: pminich@foo.com
To: esquared@foofoo.com
File: value.scr
Action: The uncleanable file is deleted.
Virus: WORM_KLEZ.H
----------------------------------
Date: 06/30/2002 00:01:21
From: mef@mememe.com
To: inet@microsoft.com
File: Nr.pif
Action: The uncleanable file is deleted.
Virus: WORM_KLEZ.H
----------------------------------
...
...

I'm trying to place each record on one line (for a sql load). The list screams multi-dimensional array with hash references. But those weren't covered in "Learning Perl" and I'm having difficulties applying examples in "The Perl Cookbook". I know to set the input field seperator to $/='---' to seperate my records, but then what? I'm not sure what to do w/ each record or how to parse it beyond that. I'm currently building a non-multi-dimensional approach with simple RE conditionals...

open(LF,"$logFile") || die "Can't open $logFile: $!\n";
open(OF,">$outputFile") || die;
while ($line=<LF>) {
        chomp($line);
        if ($line =~ /^Date:\s+(\S+)\s(\S+)/) {
                $date=$1 . " " . $2;
        }
        if ($line=~ /^From:\s+(\S+)/) {
                $from=$1;
        }
        if ($line=~ /^To:\s+\S+/) {
          # Some "To: lines have multipe ", "
          # delimited addresses  
     my ($crap, @to);<br>
                ($crap, @to)=split(/\s+/,$line);
        print OF "$date\t$from\t@to\n";
        }
}
close(LF);
close(OF);

[download]

... which is limited to simple if/then statments (the curse of predicate logic classes) and bad regular expressions. I'm really not sure what to do. I can pull my vars here, but each record is a line. Plus it doesn't give me the functionality I really need (I will eventually need to manipulate some of these fields). I was thinking of adding something like (from the Cook Book): 

for $x (1 .. 10) {<br>
    for $y (1 .. 10) {<br>
        $LoL[$x][$y] = func($x, $y);<br>
    }

[download]

for each var so I could build my matricies; but then I would leave me with something like $foo[$a][$b][$c][$d][$e]; however, I don't know what I have here -- other than a headache. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated; including more daily uses for references.-- Phaedo

In reply to virus log parser by phaedo

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