I have a message board, a file, that looks like this:
From Sam (Wed Jul 11 18:12:08 2001):

This space intentionally filled.
_________________________________________________________
From Blah Blah (Wed Jul 10 01:05:55):

Message
_________________________________________________________
Rinse and repeat. New posts are dumped to the top of the file, and a blank line always follows the header. Anything is fair game between that and the seperator.
In a busy place, this file can be filled with lots of random crap, and can bury important and useful info quite quickly.
What I want is a perl spell I can cast over this file to seperate the signal from the noise by checking the name of the person who posted, eg, posts from "Administrator" would stay around much longer than posts from "Joe Luser."
The tough part, for me, being a perl neophyte is to find the good ones.
I plan to go about it by grabbing the good posts and throwing them into a new file, and replacing the old file with the new file.

In reply to Message Board Mangling by achiles

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.