As long as you have to think about regexes anyway, you can use a regex that parses your text at the same time that it's splitting it.

my $LINE_PATTERN = qr{
    ([^:]+)  # capture everything before ...
    :\s*     # the colon and any newline or other whitespace,
    ([^\n]+) # then capture everything before
    \n       # the next newline
}msx;  

my $app_text = "one:partridge\ntwo:\nturtle doves\nthree:french hens\n
+";

while ($app_text =~ /$LINE_PATTERN/g) {
    print "$1: $2\n";
}

[download]

If you were planning to put the fields in a hash, you can do it all at once:

my %value_of = $app_text =~ /$LINE_PATTERN/g;

while (my ($field, $value) = each %value_of) {
    print "$field: $value\n";
}

[download]

In reply to Re: Pattern match for split() - need match but not match syntax by Narveson
in thread Pattern match for split() - need match but not match syntax by Tanoti

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