Hello, I am trying to write a small program/function that will isolate a string(s) in a sentence. What I am doing is I am parsing a file that contains a list of SQLs. The SQLs ofcourse contain a list of tables from which the SQL is either (updating, deleting, inserting into etc). What I want is to just isolate the table name in the SQL. The file contains ONE SQL per line. I am going to offer some really bad sample code to demonstrate how I would like this to work. I have tried countless solutions and haven't been able to get it to work yet. Please help if you can. 

#The first thing I want to do is to be able to call the function from 
+the command line along with the name of the file to parse followed by
+ the keyword to isolate.
$FileName=shift;
$String=shift;

#Then I would open the file to parse before going any further
open(INFILE, $FileName) or die "Cant open the file\n";

#Then I think I should convert the file to a list to parse
@file=<INFILE>;

#Then I guess I would do something like the following

#While reading in from the file
while(<INFILE>)
{
#Save the contents of EACH line
$TheLine = $_;

#Then I would search through each element of the line
foreach $x (@file) #or $TheLine
{
#Then I would check to see if the string entered on the command line e
+xists in the line (which it always will because I will know which SQL
+s e.g. delete, update, etc...I am searching for in the file)
if(exists $TheLine{$String})
{
#Then I want to delete (or replace) everything BEFORE the keyword $Str
+ing with a blank.....basically meaning erase it. This is where I am a
+bsolutely lost at because I don't know of a relatively easy way to do
+ this. I figured I would use the S// operator something like

s/.*$String//g   #Basically do something like that

#This would leave only the String I was looking for FOLLOWED by the re
+st of the line.


}#end if

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In reply to isolating strings by dhudnall

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