There're a quiet a few bugs in this, and I think you'd really benefit from putting use strict at the top of your programs.

Anyway, you're missing a curly bracket, and you've spelt "view" wrongly in your print statement, so you'd never get a proper result.

Also, the string you're trying to match: "(view: pa_Iden etc etc)" has got spaces in it, so you'll never succeed in your match if you use the non-whitespace character, \w. You could substitute that for "." which matches anything, although I have heard monks say that ".*" is bad practice (I'm still quite a novice tho', so I don't know why they say this!).

Finally, when you assign to $view, you mean $2, not $1. You could do with taking out some of those brackets, which are confusing you with backreferences.

Here's a version which works: 

while(<check>)
{    if (m/^(?:Update Status:)\s*(\w+)/)
    {    $target = $1;
    }
    if ($target eq "open")
    {    if (m/^(?:Update Status:)\s*(\w+)\s*(.*)$/)
        {    $view = $2;
        }
        print "$target\n";
        print "$view\n";
        close(check);
    }
}

[download]
However, here's a slightly more concise version which only uses one regex: 
while(<check>)
{    if (m/^(?:Update Status:)\s*(\w+)\s*(.*)$/)
    {    if ($1 eq "open")
        {    $view = $2;
            print "$view\n";
            close(check);
        }
    }
}

[download]
Note that in each of these, as soon as an "Update: open" line is found, the file is closed. I don't know if that's what you want, but if not, you'll have to move that close(check); line.

HTH
Dennis

In reply to Re: regex on a line by Basilides
in thread regex on a line by Sara

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