A collegue of mine is working on parsing a file, which
is part of a database... The person that wrote this
database has kinda screwed up, because he/she used 1 field
for 3 values, I`ll explain:

In The Netherlands, a surname CAN be prepended by (amongst
others) one of the following:
'VAN DER','VAN DE','DEN','DE','VAN' ...
I have no clue what this is called in English, but
I would like to call it a 'prependition' :)

Anyways... The fields in every line are:

NAME<Mandatory> PREPENDITION<maybe> HAVENT_GOT_A_CLUE<maybe>

I wanted to help, and I`ve tried different ways to parse
this, and I only have a little sample data, but I came up
with this: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $Prep_Re=join '|',('VAN DER','VAN DE','DEN','DE','VAN');

print "Name\t\tPrependition\t\tWhatever\n";
while (<DATA>)
{
 chomp;
 s/\s{2,}/ /g;
 my ($Name,$Prep,$Unknown);
 ($Name,$Prep,$Unknown)=($`,$1,$')      if (/ ($Prep_Re)/);
 ($Name,$Unknown)=($`,$1)               if ((!$Name)&&(/ (\S*?$)/));
 $Prep||=''; 
 print "$Name\t\t$Prep\t\t$Unknown\n";
};

__DATA__
WINTER DE   <A240>
ZANDEN VAN DER     ŤAť
JENSEN  230
WOODHEAD  <D>
BRINK    130,-
HEYDIER DEN  <240>
SMITSER  (4X115PJ)
LINDEN VAN DER
MOTEL GOLDEN LEEUW <A225>

[download]

It works for my sample data, but I can already think of
cases where it won`t work... and... I have a gut-feeling
this can be done better (I`m not a regex-wiz) ...

Any pointers ?

GreetZ!,

print "profeth still\n" if /bird|devil/;

In reply to Can this be parsed ? by ChOas

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