As for your problem with stopping, I'm not seeing any reason why this section wouldn't work (assuming $foo and $bar are what you want them to be)

Ps. You can print $. instead of keeping a counter.

The lines will not contain both $foo and $bar at the same time. As a very newbie I do not understand exactly what your code is saying. (my programming experiance comes from pascal programming in high school 6 years ago.) Also, how does Perl know that it is at the end of a file?

Stuffy

See eof:

if ( eof FILEHANDLE ) {
   print "Reached end of file.\n";
}
[download]



[ ar0n ]

This doesn't do what (s)he wants. They're looking at grabbing a block starting with $foo and up to, but not including, $bar.

(as far as I can see).

cLive ;-)

you are correct, I do not want to include $bar. I wouldn't mind if it started after (not including) $foo either.
Stuffy
(is a he)

I'll just latch onto one of your questions:

>Is there an easier way to test and print between two points in a file,

Yes, there is. I tried to explain it in from...to

In your case, I'd recommend you break out of the loop after you're finished with the tool:

  while (<FOO_FILE>){
       if  (/$foo/){
            $that = 1;
       }
       if  (/$bar/){
            last;  # emergency exit from the loop ;-)
       }
       if  ($that){
             print $_;
       }
  }
[download]

You could also seperate it into two loops, one for searching for the tool, one for reading the lines for that tool.

  while (<FOO_FILE>){ 
       last if /$foo/;
       # ignore all lines until we find foo
  }

  while (<FOO_FILE>){
       last if  /$bar/;
       print $_;
       # do something with the lines we find now
  }

  close FOO_FILE;
  # just ignore the rest of the file
[download]

--
Brigitte    'I never met a chocolate I didnt like'    Jellinek
http://www.horus.com/~bjelli/         http://perlwelt.horus.at

if(/$foo/.../$bar/){
}
[download]

So, why not make up a few lines of fake data to give us some idea of structure. And tell us what you are putting in $this and $that?

My money's on a dodgy regexp :)

cLive ;-)

I do have some sample text in my origional post. That is simular to what can be found in my text file, except there are 26 of one type of tool, 20 of another type, and 10 of another. I am only conserned with the first 26. My actual code is:



while (<PD_FILE>){
    if (/$tool_number/)
        $continue = 1;
     }
    if (/$end_tool/)
         $continue = 0;
      }
     if ($continue){
        print $_;
       }
}
[download]



the value for $tool_number is Tool01 which will and does give $end_tool a value of Tool02. Everything that I have checked up to this point seems to work except the loop. I tried some code that was posted as a reply to another question.


while (<^(*?)$tool_number(.*)$/) {
[download]



that did not seem to work either.

stuffy

Hmmm, maybe this will make sense? (adding the braces you missed (typo :)

my $tool_number = 1; # (say - perhaps you're looping through them, hen
+ce...
$tool_number = sprintf(%02d,$tool_number); # add leading zero, if need
+ed


while (<PD_FILE>){
  if (/^Tool$tool_number/) {
    $continue = 1;
  }
  if (/^Tool/ && !(/^Tool$tool_number/)) {
    $continue = 0;
  }
  if ($continue){
    print $_;
  }
}
[download]

FYI - ^ matches the beginning of a string (line in this case).

cLive ;-)

Yes, but is the sample text output or input. If input, what do you want output? ditto vice versa...

cLive ;-)