I've had difficulty peeling data from a flat file. I initially thought I could terminal line grep it, but it urped all over the very long lines and Perl is more flexible anyway if I need to add functions later. The information I'm seeking uses some reserved characters that need to be escaped in grep.

Here's what I'm trying to do:

1. Open a text file with a mucky-thick block of text (almost no line feeds).

2. Search for occurrences of a string that begins with -/ (dash slash) that variably contains between 5 and 20 alphanumeric characters and which ends with ?srt= (question mark srt equals).

Here are examples:

3. Write the alphanumeric strings to a text file, each occurrence on a new line.

Thanks for your accumulated (and accumulating) wisdom.

In reply to Peeling Data with Reserved Characters and Long Lines by PerlReader

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