in reply to Parsing and Matching Text with Map

$ perl -e' use Data::Dumper; my $data = qq( Stuff here junk text <tr><td class=\047menutext\047 align=\047center\047><input typ employee[1] = new employee_element(15,"Bob","Smith","Human Resources") +; employee[2] = new employee_element(03,"Harry","Jones","Coordinato"); employee[3] = new employee_element(23,"Janet","Davies","Development"); employee[4] = new employee_element(95,"James","McAvery","Communication +s"); more junk text ); my @employees_my_try = map { /^employee\[(\d+)] = new employee_element\((\d+),"([^"]+)","([^"]+ +)","([^"]+)"\);/ ? [ $1, $2, $3, $4, $5 ] : () } split /\n/, $data; print Dumper \@employees_my_try; ' $VAR1 = [ [ '1', '15', 'Bob', 'Smith', 'Human Resources' ], [ '2', '03', 'Harry', 'Jones', 'Coordinato' ], [ '3', '23', 'Janet', 'Davies', 'Development' ], [ '4', '95', 'James', 'McAvery', 'Communications' ] ];