I have a simple extraction script for extracting shape names from a visio stencil in .vsx (XML format). Problem is, there's a bug in Visio that puts newlines in some of the name strings. If the names are clean, this works as a regex:

<Master ID='.*?' NameU='(.*?)'

"(.*?)" then extracts fine as $1.

However, since newlines are present, I have to OR with something that matches them:

while ($text=~/<Master ID='.*?' NameU='(.*?)' |<Master ID='.*?' NameU='(.*?)/sg)

This matches the names containing newlines, but apparently because the match goes over the line boundary, the $1 contains a null. Only an empty line in my output shows that the match was made.

Is there a way out of this catch 22 when you have to match something containing a newline and extract data from it?

In reply to Extract data from regex match where "." is newline? by dsayars

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