Matching Multiple Multiple-Line Regex

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

Hello, I am trying to write a code to obtain certain tables (both in text and html formats) from text documents. I am having trouble obtaining the data between the 'Table' tags. Here are key pieces of my current code:

my $startstring='(<table)';
my $keywords='((Beneficially\s*Owned)|(Beneficial\s*Owners)|(Security\
+s*Ownership)|(more\s*than\s*5\spercent)|(more\s*than\s*5\%)|(more\s*t
+han\s*five\s*percent)|(All\s*Directors\s*and\s*Executive\s*Officers)|
+(Preferred\s*Stock))';
my $endstring='(\/table>)';

{
# this step removes the default end of line character (\n)
# so the the entire file can be read in at once.
local $/;
open (SLURP, "$direct$slash"."$file") or die "can't open $file: $!"; 
#read the contents into data
$data = <SLURP>;
}

@finds=$data=~m/$keywords\s*.{0,1500}\s*($startstring.*?$endstring)/gi
+sm;
[download]

The issue is is that I am obtaining matches of $keywords, etc. I want to obtain just what is inside the parentheses of my regex above. Any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated. Thanks so much.

Comment on Matching Multiple Multiple-Line Regex Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Matching Multiple Multiple-Line Regex by jwkrahn (Abbot) on Feb 20, 2012 at 22:35 UTC
It appears that you want to use non-capturing parentheses (?:pattern) in some of your patterns.	[reply]
Re^2: Matching Multiple Multiple-Line Regex by kbone (Novice) on Feb 21, 2012 at 02:25 UTC
Thanks for the help!	[reply]
Re: Matching Multiple Multiple-Line Regex by JavaFan (Canon) on Feb 20, 2012 at 23:08 UTC
Remove all the parenthesis from $startstring, $keywords and $endstring, and write: `@finds = $data =~ m/(?:$keywords)\s.{0,1500}\s$startstring(.*?)$ends +tring/gis;` [download] But do note that if your text is: `Security Ownership bla bla <table>Foo bar</table> more than 5% <table>Text text</table> All Directors and Executive Officers <table>Even more text</table>` [download] `@finds` will only get one entry: "Even more text", due to the greediness of `.{0,1500}`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Matching Multiple Multiple-Line Regex by kbone (Novice) on Feb 21, 2012 at 02:26 UTC
Thank you so much for your reply!	[reply]