Hi Monks,

I am trying to split a block of text that looks like this:

ABD - some text
ACDB- some more text
WD  - more text
    - which spills onto the next line
SD  - another line
[download]

Into pairs of text before the "-" and text following.

i.e.

$myHash{'ABD'} = "some text"
$myHash{'ACDB'} = "some more text"
etc.
[download]

The text before the "-" is always 4 characters, at least 2 A-Z's and always uppercase, and there is always a space after the "-".

So far what I have is :

/^([A-Z]{2,4})(\s{0,2})\-\s((.*)\n)*/g
[download]

What I think this matches is :
Start of line
2 - 4 capital alpha characters
0 - 2 whitespaces characters
A hyphen
A whitespace
( Any character any number of time followed by a newline ) any number of times

But it isnt doing what I thought it would so I must have something wrong :-)

Any help you could throw my way would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
rsiedl

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." Calvin-The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes

Update:

Thanks very much for your help guys.
This is what I ended doing in the end:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

# The data
my $data =<< "END";
ABD - some text
ACDB- some more text
WD  - more text
    - which spills onto the next line
SD  - another line
END

# Search and replace a newline followed by four spaces
# followed by a hyphen with nothing
$data =~ s/\n(\s{4})-//ig;

# Split the data into lines
my @lines = split(/\n/, $data);

# Scroll though the lines
foreach my $line ( @lines ) { # start-foreach
        # Check to make sure our line is formatted correctly
        if ($line =~ /^(\S+)\s*-\s+(.+)$/) { # start-if
                # Get the values out of the regex
                my ( $key, $value ) = $line =~ /^(\S+)\s*-\s+(.+)$/;
                # Print the results
                print "$key, $value\n";
        } # end-if
        # Else line is not formatted correctly
        else { # start-else
                print "Badly formatted line!\n";
        } # end-else
} # end-foreach
[download]

Cheers,
rsiedl.

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