Does grouping support multiple lines

If you read in the text one line at the time, you might reconsider using the .. or ... operator. That way, you can have a condition run over several lines in your data.

For example:

my $buffer;
while(<>) {
    if(my $counter = (/^name\s.*\{/ ... /^name\s.*\{/)) {
        if($counter == 1) {    # begin
            $buffer = '';
        }
        $buffer .= $_;
        if($counter =~ /E/) {  # end
            if($buffer =~ /name(.*)name/s) {
                print "Found: $1\n";
            }
            redo;   # retry with same line
        }
    } 
}
[download]

Unfortunately this will only find one match in your test data, because there's only two "name" strings — thus, only one range between them.

That looks great, but that only prints out the first name{} entry and not hte second, so it looks like it trys to create each name{} as a single string. Maybe that is the way to go is there a quick way to read the file and put it into a sinlge string ? for each name{] entry

OK I experimented a little with eof, and I found eof (no handle, no parens) returns true on the last line. So If I extend the end side of the flipflop operator with an extra test on eof, and set a flag to true only if it succeeds because of this extra test, then I can safely check for the last match, too. I do need to modify the regex a little to allow for this, too.

#! perl -w
my $buffer;
LINE: while(<DATA>) {
    my $eof;  # flase by default
    if(my $counter = (/^name\s.*\{/ ... (/^name\s.*\{/ || ($eof = eof)
+))) {
        if($counter == 1) {    # begin
            $buffer = '';
        }
        $buffer .= $_;
        if($counter =~ /E/) {  # end
            if($buffer =~ /name(.*?)(^name|\z)/ms) {
                print "Found: $1\n";
            }
            redo LINE unless $eof;   # retry with same line, unless en
+d condition is BECAUSE OF eof
        }
    }
}
__DATA__
name value {
   test 1;
   test 2;
   test 5;
}
name three {
   eat 4;
   eat 5;
}
name four {
   eat 6;
   eat 7;
}
[download]

Result:

Found:  value {
   test 1;
   test 2;
   test 5;
}

Found:  three {
   eat 4;
   eat 5;
}

Found:  four {
   eat 6;
   eat 7;
}
[download]

undef $/;
while(<>){
 while(/console(.*?)}/gs){
 $_ =~ s/\s//g;
 printf ("String = $_\n");
 }
}
[download]

2006-10-14 Retitled by planetscape, as per Monastery guidelines
Original title: 'Grouping strings over a few line'

Edited by planetscape - swapped parent and child nodes so Grouping strings over a few line became the thread root