• Regular Expressions Tutorial, the Basics (for BEGINNERS)
• perlrequick
• http://www.regular-expressions.info/index.html
• Mastering Regular Expressions

Any one of those will help you find your own answer. You'll find the road to enlightenment more fulfilling. ;)

Your teacher can't be reached for further discussion and suggestions?

Apparently Google is down, too...

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

Perhaps I reacted hastily. But the question does sound like a poorly-summarized version of a class assignment.

In an effort to be helpful rather than smug, here are a few suggestions:

• In Perl, it's typical to do textual search/replace with the s/// operator (substitution operator), which is described in perlre, perlop, and perlretut
• If you're dealing with files you'll be opening one for input, one for output, and then at the end maybe replacing the input file with the output file (overwriting). If you need further help with files you may want to ask specifically where you're hung up.
• You will probably be looping, perhaps over lines of an input file. Loops are discussed in perlsyn and perlintro, if I'm not mistaken.

You're most likely to get good help here if you post where you are with respect to the problem. Have you tried something? Do you have a plan of where to begin? Do you have at least a strategy of how you would accomplish the problem as a series of simple steps? Do you have any code written? The more you can give us, and the more specific you can be with respect to your hangups the better we can assist you. But you're not likely to get much help if the sum total of your effort on the project is simply posting a two sentence question here asking someone to do it for you.

Yes a scholl Project, I am trying to understand what I am missing, and trying to find the correct methodology to help understand perl more. #!/usr/bin/perl # # # # # # ## { open (story8, "story8.txt") or die "can't open file"; while ($line = <story8>){ print $line;} if ($_ =~ /^(^\s+)(\s.*?)*\s\1$/) { print ("the line is $_ \n"); } } I have tried different ways but have a had time find the correct strings to get it to work. I have looked on google, but seem to run into good explanations, or something different is displayed _____________________________________________________________ This is also a combo class, I was not informed by my advisor when signing up, that this was broke into two parts, the first half 5 weeks we are to learn how to code using perl, and the second half is unix administration.

I think you are trying to do something like show which lines have repeated words in them. The problem description in your original post is a little unclear and seemed to cover several requirements but your code hints at this solution. Given this input file:

this and that
fish and chips and mushy peas
the cat and catkin
boom bang boom
[download]

This code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
use strict;
use warnings;

my $inputFile = q{spw888564.txt};
open my $inputFH, q{<}, $inputFile
   or die qq{open: < $inputFile: $!\n};

while ( <$inputFH> )
{
    next unless m{(\w+).*\b\1\b};
    print qq{Found '$1' repeated in: $_};
}

close $inputFH
   or die qq{close: < $inputFile: $!\n};
[download]

Produces this output:

Found 'and' repeated in: fish and chips and mushy peas
Found 'boom' repeated in: boom bang boom
[download]

I hope I have guessed correctly and this is some help but please ask more questions if things are unclear.

Cheers,

JohnGG

• When you do readline and put it into $line, $_ does not get a value (see perlintro)
• There is no need to write $_ =~ /.../ because by default /.../ matches against $_, but in this case you should be matching against $line
• Use strict warnings and diagnostics or die
• Read this if you want to cut your development time in half!
• For them to be readable, you must enclose code/data in <code></code> (or <c></c> for short) tags

See also: My Favourite Regex Tools