Ok thanks to everyones recommendation here for Apache::LogParse I have managed to build a quite effective log parsing tool.

Except...

The logfiles all have the request part of the logfile in quotes as one string. So it looks like this normally:

GET /some/path.php?somevalue=eddie HTTP/1.1

but the problem is that it doesn't ALWAYS look like that. But somehow I need to slit that string into the Method, Request (before the ?), URI query (after the ?), and the protocol version. If I just split it based on the string above I of course run into the problem of "Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string" because of course the variables I split into get set as undefined due to the string not always appearing consistently. Sometimes it's lacking the protocol version, sometimes there isn't a URI query, sometimes the whole string is just one clump of characters due to some goofy attempt against the web server.

So I'm hoping someone can offer advice on how I can do this so that if the string doesn't contain all four components, the variable just gets set to "" or something.

so far I am stuck just doing something like this: 
sub split_request( $ )
{
    my $http_request     = $_[0];
    my $method            = "";
    my $web_request        = "";
    my $request            = "";
    my $uri                = "";
    my $version            = "";

    ($method,$web_request) = split( / /,$http_request, 2 );
    ($request,$version) = split( / /,$web_request, 2 );
        ($request,$uri) = split( /\?/,$request );
}

[download]

help?

In reply to splitting a string that appears inconsistently in structure by TheGorf

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