Hello Monks, I am working on a script which parses a set of log files. The goal is to extract the values of certain tags in the log files with capture groups. The data I am parsing looks similar to this:

2009/01/15 01:23:45:678: ASDF: [8=FIX.4.4^A9=228^A35=D^A49=ZYXW^A56=MY
+CO^A34=6^A52=20090115-01:23:45^A116=BLAH^A129=HALB^A50=MEH^A1=HEM^A11
+=abcefg123456^A15=ZZZ^A21=1^A22=5^A38=100^A40=2^A44=4.80000000^A48=ZV
+ZZT.N^A54=2^A55=ZVZZT^A59=0^A60=20090115-01:23:45^A100=MEH^A10=111^A]

[download]
Note that ^A represents the SOH character (Ascii val 1).

My goal is to be able to capture the value of any given tag. So far, I have tried this:

if($line =~ m/^A55=(.*?^A)/){
    print "$1|";
} else {
    print "|";
}

[download]
My output is a pipe delimited set of values. The above PERL works with the exception that each value in my output contains the "^A". I want to correct his by capturing just the value between "\d\d\d\d=" and the next "^A" (ungreedy) where every "d" is known. If no match is found (i.e. this tag is not present) I want to output just a "blank" pipe.

The second issue I would like to resolve is to simplify or generalize my statements. Currently I have a series of if statements, such as the one above, checking for every tag I'm trying to capture (e.g. 55=, 48=, 22=). I'd like to see if there is a more "clever" way to do this in a single statement. Something such as this, perhaps:

if($line =~ m/(^A22=.*?^A).*(^A40=.*?^A).*(^A48=.*?^A).*(^A54=.*?^A).*
+(^A55=.*?^A)/g){
    print "$1|$2|$3|$4|$5\n";
}

[download]
Please note that if one of the patterns above does not match, I'd like the corresponding $buffer variable to contain a blank rather than the next matched group value.

Thanks very much for your time and consideration,

_j

In reply to Log Parsing using Regex by Anonymous Monk

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