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

Howdy

I've got file I want to split into chunks, but I'm not sure where the newlines and spaces lie, or how they are interwoven.

It's got the basic structure:

Title Line (\n?)

(4 spaces)Author Line (\n?)

(4 spaces)URL Line (\n?)

... Repeat

However there are things interwoven like header lines:

-----------------------------------------

BLAH Header

-----------------------------------------

Now my question ;) :

if I split the file using: s/\n/ms

I get a string of 0's and 1's

1111100001011001110111110011110011111001111001111100111011111110011111110011111100111011111001111100

I just *know* this is useful information, but how can I incorporate it into a (relatively) simple pattern match??

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Finding a pattern to split on
by kilinrax (Deacon) on Dec 05, 2000 at 01:00 UTC
    You don't want to split the file using s/\n/ms, that's a substitution operator. Use /\n/, a match operator.
[reply]

      Sorry, meant:

      split /\n/sm

      Ideas??

[reply]
[d/l]
        The following code should work fine, assuming $data contains what you're trying to split: 
        #!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
use strict;
 
my $data = q|Title Line
    Author Line
    URL Line
|;
 
my @data = split /\s*\n\s*/, $data;
 
my $i;
for ($i=0; $i<=$#data; $i++){
    print "$i: $data[$i]\n";
}

        [download]
        However, if you're reading from a file, i suspect you want something more like this: 
        #!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
use strict;
 
open DATA, 'splitdata.txt';
 
my @data;
while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    s|^\s+||;
    s|\s+$||;
    push @data, $_;
}
 
my $i;
for ($i=0; $i<=$#data; $i++){
    print "$i: $data[$i]\n";
}

        [download]
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