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

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

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 $&;} 

Sorry, I'm a forum retard.

This works:


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



This does not:


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

My last post wasn't a solution to my problem, but was the actual regex with brackets included.