Greetings Monks:

I'm having a problem trying to pattern match. What I'm trying to do, is look through a file containing records, each record contains multiple XML tags. I want to find the record containing a tag that has data of a specific length (in this case, 58 characters).

My basic code is:
# The filename should be the first arguement
$file = $ARGV[0];

# The search string should be the second arguement
$searchString = $ARGV[1];

$matchesFound = 0;
if (-e $file) {
   open (INPUTFILE, "<$file") or die "Can't open $file for input.\n";
   while ($record = <INPUTFILE>) {
      $_ = $record;
      if (/$searchString/g) {
         print $record;
         $matchesFound = $matchesFound + 1;
     }
   }
   close INPUTFILE;
   print "$matchesFound found.\n";
}
else {
   print "$file doesn't exist.\n";
}

[download]


The problem is, that I'm not quite sure exactly what expression I should be feeding to the script. Is there a way to find, say, 58 matches of a alphanumberic or space?

Thanks in advance for your help.

In reply to Pattern Matching Confusion by Anonymous Monk

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