Dear Perl-Monks

I will have a look at the links provided at the page in time, but in the meanwhile I created a counter-example to verify that my codings indeed will yield results in a way I expect them to do.

consider the following file

blabla:(123):falleriefallera
dingdong moep blubb 4711 dingdong
blob))hop((gob))sob((0815))ding
knickknack boing 44

nothing here
blabla:(123):falleriefallera
dingdong moep blubb 471 dingdong
blob))hop((gob))sob((0815))ding
knickknack boing 45

nothing here too
blabla:(1344):falleriefallera
dingdong moep blubb 4711 dingdong
blob))hop((gob))sob((0815))ding
knickknack boing 46

nothing again
blabla:(123):falleriefallera
dingdong moep blubb 4711 dingdong
blob))hop((gob))sob((0825))ding
knickknack boing 47
[download]

access it using the following perl-script:

use strict;
use warnings;

# 1. get file and stuff it into an array
# that what it will be in target code

open FILE, 'target.txt' or die "nope dude: $!";
my @stuff;

while(<FILE>){
    chomp $_;
    push @stuff, $_;
}
print "reading done ";

# 2. make a long line out of it 
# because I still have problems using an array for this :(

my $longline;
foreach my $x (@stuff){
    $longline .= $x;
}

# 3. get all matches and place them in an array array x)

my @super;
while ($longline =~ /\D+(\d+)\D+(\d+)\D+(\d+)\D+(\d+)/g){
    my @sub = ($1, $2, $3, $4);
    push @super, \@sub;
}

# 4. we should have four entries in that @super

print scalar @super, "\n";
[download]

will yield this (at least the debugger think so):

0  ARRAY(0x1f08820)
   0  123
   1  4711
   2  0815
   3  44
1  ARRAY(0x2199678)
   0  123
   1  471
   2  0815
   3  45
2  ARRAY(0x21994e0)
   0  1344
   1  4711
   2  0815
   3  46
3  ARRAY(0x219f128)
   0  123
   1  4711
   2  0825
   3  47
[download]

so it will work in the way I hoped for. IF I ever can create a valid regex for this. But now I'm busy looking into these walktroughs.

By the way; using .+? didn't made the RegEx work, but I don't understand how [^>] should be utilized to help me in my case :( Because... I do find the correct piece of plain text in my file, so how should I include "no >" and "no <" inside?

Greetings, a random visitor