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

Hi, i'm trying to extract names from a string which are separated by dashes. unfortunately perl extracts only the first and then every second one. 

$transcript =~ s/\w?/-$1/; #add leading dash
$transcript =~ s/ //g;

while ($transcript=~/-(.*?)-/msig) {
push @analysts, $1;
}
print "$_\n" for @analysts;

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can somebody help? thank you in advance!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: extracting names between symbols
by NetWallah (Canon) on Nov 18, 2009 at 01:28 UTC
    Sample data please.

    Here is code based on my assumptions of what you need: 

    my $transcript=q|tom t-Dick -Harry|; 
my @analysts= $transcript=~/([^-]+)-?/g; 
print qq|=$_=\n| for @analysts;

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    Output: 
    =tom t=
=Dick =
=Harry=

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    The RE can be tightentd to ignore leading/trailing spaces.: 
     my @a= $transcript=~/\s*([^-]+\w)\s*-?/g

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    This deletes the space after =Dick.

         Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work.
        Practice is when something works, but you don't know why it works.
        Programmers combine Theory and Practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.         -Anonymous

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[d/l]
[select]

      Thanks to both of you. Sorry for not presenting all the necessary infos. The second solution is perfect, because i need an array to work further with.

[reply]
        Glad to hear that you can proceed further!

        The solution from NetWallah looks fine to me.

        I added a line to make it clear that the foreach() in my code does use an @variable. And I showed the idioms for deleting whitespace before and after a "line". Anyway, very happy that you can proceed further! 

        #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $line = "this- is-aline  - one-  two  ";
my @array = split (/-/,$line);
foreach (@array)
{
   s/\s+$//g;  #throw away tailing whitespace
   s/^\s+//g;  #throw away leading whitespace
   print "$_\n";
}
__END__
PRINTS:
this
is
aline
one
two

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[d/l]
Re: extracting names between symbols
by Marshall (Canon) on Nov 18, 2009 at 00:53 UTC
    Please show desired output from a simple input case. I worked from your problems statement of:"i'm trying to extract names from a string which are separated by dashes" rather than your code. I think split() is better here than regex(). 
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $line = "this-is-aline-one-two";
foreach (split (/-/,$line))
{
  print "$_\n";
}
__END__
PRINTS:
this
is
aline
one
two

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

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