Building on that base, I suggest...

Unless you are absolutely sure that the input will always be in exactly the right form (now and in the future), it's a good idea to do something when the regex doesn't match -- at least a diagnostic message indicating that something isn't as expected. Along the lines of:

  if (my ($title, $row) = /TEST\s+\w+\W+(\w+)\D+(\d+)/) {
    push @records, [$title, $row];
  }
  else {
    warn "no match at $." ;
  } ;

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Of course you could make the warning message more helpful, or do something else to flag the problem.

In passing, when I checked this fragment I noted that the regex is "widely drafted" (as the lawyers would say). For real (as opposed to example) code it's a good idea to tighten up the regex, so that it doesn't happily provide duff results from duff data.

In reply to Re^2: Parsing a Simple Log File by gone2015
in thread Parsing a Simple Log File by bichonfrise74

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