Hi, I'm having a problem with multiline regexes. When I put text in a heredoc and run a multiline regex, it matches. However, when I type that text into a text file, read it in and use the same regex, it does *not* match. Anybody have any thoughts on why? I'm running on linux, so I know it couldn't be because of MS line terminators. Below is my code and the results.

Code: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $test = <<"TEST";
Line1

Line3
TEST
;

#this worksi - it matches and prints result
if ($test =~ m{
                                \w+\n
                                \n
                                \w+
                          }msx) {
        print "Heredoc test: The line \n$test\nmatches.\n";
}

open (TEST, "testfile")
        or die "cannot open testfile testfile - $!";

print "\n==================\nReading testfile\n";


#but this doesn't show a match ... why?
while (<TEST>) {
        if (m{
                  \w+\n
                  \n
                  \w+
                 }msx) {
                print "reading file test: The line \n$_\nmatches.\n";
        }

}
close (TEST);

[download]
where testfile contains the text (with special characters shown, i.e. using 'set list' in vi):

Line1$
$
Line3$

[download]
As you can see, there's nothing special about this file.

Results:

perl test2.pl
Heredoc test: The line
Line1

Line3

matches.

==================
Reading testfile

[download]

In reply to multiline regex: heredoc vs. reading file by bowei_99

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