capturing blocks of data

natty_dread has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm trying to conceptualize how I can take a file and treat blocks of that data as one entity. I just need a nudge in the right direction.
I don't have any code, but here's a sample of the text file I need to parse:

Wednesday April 14, 2004.
>> HOSTNAME    Universal scustom "\"hostname\"" HOSTNAME 
ABC RUNNING DEF RUNNING GHI RUNNING
************************** End HOSTNAME>>HOSTNAME2    Universal scusto
+m "\"hostname\"" HOSTNAME2 
ABC RUNNING DEF RUNNING GHI RUNNING
************************** End HOSTNAME2
[download]

I want to treat the text between the ">>" and "**End HOSTNAME" as 1 block of data that I can then parse through looking for certain elements. And yes, the file really is this ugly.

Edited by Chady -- added code tags.

Comment on capturing blocks of data Download Code

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Re: capturing blocks of data by graff (Chancellor) on Jun 10, 2004 at 23:25 UTC
If you're using "HOSTNAME" in your post as a sort of "placeholder" for a wide range of different strings (like "abc.def.com", "college.univ.edu", etc), then some of the replies above will be off the mark. On the other hand, if the ">>" that precedes the first occurrence of each HOSTNAME string is reliable, and if that pattern occurs only as the initial two characters of a new record, then just set perl's record separator variable ($/) to ">>". That way, the standard while loop with the diamond operator will read one full record at a time.	[reply]
Re: capturing blocks of data by Roy Johnson (Monsignor) on Jun 10, 2004 at 18:08 UTC
`$/='** End HOSTNAME';` [download] Then, if necessary, strip off everything before >> in each record. The PerlMonk `tr///` Advocate	[reply] [d/l]
Re: capturing blocks of data by McMahon (Chaplain) on Jun 10, 2004 at 18:30 UTC
I hope I read the question right. This is untested, but I think it does the right thing: `use File::Slurp; my $big_text = read_file ('bigFile.txt'); my @blocks = split/HOSTNAME/, $big_text; foreach my $block(@blocks) { print "$block\n"; }` [download] Hope that helps...	[reply] [d/l]
Re: capturing blocks of data by hardburn (Abbot) on Jun 10, 2004 at 17:47 UTC
You'll probably need to break out a full-fledged parser, like Parse::RecDescent. Start reading :) ---- send money to your kernel via the boot loader.. This and more wisdom available from Markov Hardburn.	[reply]