How to deal with long line

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

I have file that is one long line. Pattern looks like: somecharSTARTfvENDsomecharSTARTsvENDsomecharSTARTtvENDsomechar I would like to extract all values between START END so my @Result should be @Result= qw(fv sv tv) My sub is extracting only first and last finding :(

sub getInfoFromLongLine
{
    #Openning file for reading
    open(IFH,"$InputFile") || die "Can't open file: $InputFile\n";
      while($line=<IFH>)
      {
      if ($line=~/.*START(.*?)END/)
      {
          push(@Result,$1);
      }
      if ($line=~/.*?START(.*?)END/)
      {
          push(@Result,$1);
      }
      }
 return @Result;
}
[download]

Thanks in advance Gasho

Comment on How to deal with long line Download Code

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Re: How to deal with long line by GrandFather (Saint) on Sep 27, 2005 at 20:50 UTC
If the file is of modest size then read eveything into a string and: `my $str = <DATA>; my @strs = $str =~ /START(.?)END/g; print join "\n", @strs; __DATA__ somecharSTARTfvENDsomecharSTARTsvENDsomecharSTARTtvENDsomechar` [download] Update*: Change to read from a "file" Monarch has suggested to me that this is likely to get pretty slow with HUGE files, and I agree. For very large files I'd suggest using this technique. Perl is Huffman encoded by design.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: How to deal with long line by gasho (Beadle) on Sep 28, 2005 at 13:09 UTC
Thanks a lot it worked fine, I updated it to read from a file: `sub getInfoFromLongLine { #Openning file for reading open(IFH,"$InputFile") \|\| die "Can't open file: $InputFile\n"; my $str = <IFH>; my @wanted_substrings = $str =~ /<A>(.*?)<\/A>/g; return "@wanted_substrings"; }` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: How to deal with long line by philcrow (Priest) on Sep 27, 2005 at 21:04 UTC
This is an ideal case for extract_tagged method of Text::Balanced. From the perldoc, I think you should say something like: `my $remainder = $original_string; my @answers; while ( defined $remainder ) { my $extracted; ( $extracted, $remainder ) = extract_tagged( $remainder, 'START', 'END', undef, { bad => ['START'] }, ); push @answers, $extracted; }` [download] Phil	[reply] [d/l]
Re: How to deal with long line by chester (Hermit) on Sep 27, 2005 at 20:47 UTC
Here's one way that reads in the string a little bit at a time, which is good if your data is very large. Mostly untested, but works for your data: `use warnings; use strict; my @wanted_substrings; { local $/ = 'END'; while(my $string = <DATA>) { push @wanted_substrings, ($string =~ /START(.*)END/); } } print "@wanted_substrings"; __DATA__ somecharSTARTfvENDsomecharSTARTsvENDsomecharSTARTtvENDsomechar` [download]	[reply] [d/l]