{
    local $/ = undef;
    open(FILE, "<file.txt") or die "open failed on file.txt: $!";
    $wholetext = <FILE>;
    close(FILE);
}
if ( $wholetext =~ /CONNAME\((\d+?\.\d+?\.\d+?\.\d+?)\)\s+CURRENT/ ) 
{
     print $1;
}

__DATA__

    CONNAME(163.231.99.129)                 CURRENT
    CHLTYPE(SVRCONN)                        STATUS(RUNNING)
    LSTMSGTI(03.45.47)                      LSTMSGDA(2003-11-21)

__OUTPUT__

163.231.99.129
[download]

"\s" will match a newline (and carriage-return if you have any); when "." is inside square brackets (as part of a character class), it does not work as a wildcard, and will only match a literal period.

You could simplify your regex a lot (and make it easier to understand and less likely to break):

if ( /CONNAME.([\d.]+).*?CURRENT\s+CHL/ ) {
    print $&, $/;
}
[download]

The  [\d.]+ bit will match a string consisting of digits and/or periods (one or more) -- i.e. any of ".", "..", "...", "1", "12", "123", "1.2.3", etc. Meanwhile, the periods outside the square brackets will match anything, like parens, whitespace, etc.

This is my data


    CONNAME(163.231.99.129)                 CURRENT
    CHLTYPE(SVRCONN)                        STATUS(RUNNING)
    LSTMSGTI(03.45.47)                      LSTMSGDA(2003-11-21)


Here is the regex (thanks for helping clean it up)


if (/CONNAME\((\d.+)\)\s.*CURRENT\s.*/is){
print $&;} 


It's still not showing the brackets around my character classes in my post, sorry.

Where it fails is when trying to match this from CONNAME through CHLTYPE.
I can match CONNAME through to CURRENT with the newline character.
But if I try and match any characters on the next line, the program returns no output.

How are you getting your data into your code? I ask because you might be doing this:

while (<>) {
    ....
}
[download]

...which gets a line at a time, explaining why adding one more character after your regex fails. I put your data into a file named /tmp/corpus.txt and did this, which worked:

cat /tmp/corpus.txt | perl -le '$_ = join("", <>); \
  print $& if /CONNAME\((\d{1,3}(\.\d{1,3}){3})\)\s*CURRENT\s*CHL/;'

CONNAME(163.231.99.129)                 CURRENT
    CHL
[download]

The different regex (\d{1,3}(\.\d{1,3}){3}) is slightly better at validating an IP address. Probably not essential unless you think your data might get munged; it could still match bogus things like "999.99.9.999", but it'll filter out bits like "1.2.3.4.5" or "2555.254.0.3".

Note that loading $_ like that is often frowned upon; you might consider:

my $corpus = join("", <>);
print $& 
  if $corpus =~ /CONNAME\((\d{1,3}(\.\d{1,3}){3})\)\s*CURRENT\s*CHL/;
[download]

Hope that helps!

--j

First of all, look up Writeup Formatting Tips -- it explains how to post code coherently, which is like this:

<code>

# perl code here, with literal brackets intact: [blah]
[download]

</code>

As for the regex problem itself, now that I see what the data "really" looks like (though it's hard to be sure how many whitespace characters there really are), maybe something like this would work better:

if ( /\w+.([\d.]+).\s+\w+\s+\w+/ ) {
   print $&, $/;
}
[download]

Or, if you really want to be specific about the characters you want to match:

if ( /\w+.([\d.]+).\s+CURRENT\s+CHLTYPE/ ) {
   print $&, $/;
}
[download]

I did try those out on your data, and the print-out includes the linefeed where it belongs.

Now, I presume that your real goal is something other than that odd looking output from print, and depending on what your real goal is, maybe a regex isn't your best choice -- e.g. how about using split()?

update: having seen ercparker's reply below, I should point out that I was assuming all along that you already had all three lines of text stored together in $_ -- but if you've actually been reading and matching one line at a time (as most people usually do), then ercparker is right: you can't match across a newline if $_ does not contain anything after the first newline.

Here we go...



if (/CONNAME\(([\d.]+)\)[\s.]*CURRENT[\s.]*/is){
print $&;}