Monks, I have a short script that looks for commands and arguments buried within an email message. Since email sometimes inserts garbage (salutations, signatures, etc) before and after the message text, I need to find valid commands within the text.

I know the list of valid commands, and in this case, valid args are numeric. So, for the input "garbage validcommand 1234 221 garbage 999 213", I need to parse out the args "1234 221", and throw the rest out. The number of args can vary.

I've found something that works, but it seems inelegant:

$string="garbage validcommand 1234  221 garbage 999 213";
while ($string =~ s/validcommand\s+(\d+)/validcommand /) {
    push(@args,$1);
}

[download]
Anyone have some better ideas ?

In reply to Parsing arguments with surrounding garbage. by kschwab

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