danj35 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hey monks,

Asked an question earlier about counting the number of lines in a string (not a file)(http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=839575). The code works fine for this: 

my $count = ($string =~ tr/\n//);

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Now I need to split the $string at line 20. Anyone know how to do this?

Cheers

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Split a string at a given line number
by Corion (Patriarch) on May 12, 2010 at 10:29 UTC

    How about splitting the string at every line and then joining the first 20 together again, and the rest as well?

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Re: Split a string at a given line number
by JavaFan (Canon) on May 12, 2010 at 10:46 UTC
    Untested: 
    my @chunks = $string =~ /(?|(?:((?:[^\n]*\n){19}[^\n]*)\n)|((?s:.*)))/
+g;

    [download]
    This does just as split, it loses every 20th newline. You can make it less complex is you want to keep the delimiter.
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[d/l]
      push @arr, $& while ($no=~ m/([^\n]+.*?\n){1,20}/gs);
print "\n$_" for @arr;

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[d/l]
        That works for me, but is there a way you can split it without the newlines being removed? Thanks.
[reply]

      Hi thanks for that. I've tested it and I can't seem to get that to work. At the moment my code for it looks like this: 

      my @chunks = ($string =~ /(?|(?:((?:[^\n]*\n){19}[^\n]*)\n)|((?s:.*)))
+/g);
print Dumper @chunks[0];

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      That returns the message: 

       Sequence (?|...) not recognized in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/(?|
+ <-- HERE (?:((?:[^\n]*\n){19}[^\n]*)\n)|((?s:.*)))/.

      [download]

      Wouldn't know where to start with fixing that I'm afraid.

      Thanks.

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[d/l]
[select]
        It seems you're running an old Perl. (?|) was introduced in the previous major version of Perl, 5.10, which was released 2.5 years ago.

        You may consider upgrading to 5.10, or even 5.12.

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[d/l]

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