I have a small perl script that I am trying to use to monitor backups. As I have several customers with different backup systems, I am trying to use a regular expression to break out the month, day and year in the log file. Since I couldn't rely on what format the date would be in, I attempted to write the RE with named capture buffers. Here is the expression:

^Backup completed on (?<month>\d+)\/(?<day>\d+)\/(?<year>\d+).+?(?<hour>\d+):(?<minute>\d+)\s*(?<mark>AM|PM)

This is the line it should match:

Backup completed on 11/11/2008 at 6:24 AM.

This is the error I get instead:

Sequence (?<m...) not recognized in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/^Backup completed on (?<m <-- HERE onth>\d+)\/(?<day>\d+)\/(?<year>\d+).+?(?<hour>\d+):(?<minute>\d+)\s*(?<mark>AM|PM)/ at check_backups.pl line 187. at check_backups.pl line 187 I'm sure I'm doing something stupid, but I just can't see it. Can anyone please help me out with this?

In reply to Problem named capture buffers by dirtdart

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.