Can someone explain to me how to do multiline matching? I am trying to extract three consecutive lines from a datafile containing multiple records like this:
Name: Bob City: Austin State: Texas Address: 123 Whatever Age: 46
Name: Jose City: Denver State: Colorado Address: 118 Mystreet Age: 28
This is what I have so far, but it doesn't seem to work:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
open FILE, "<file1" or die "Can't open file!\n";
while (<FILE>){
if ( /^Name: (.*)\nCity: (.*)\nState: (.*)/) {
print "Match found!\n"; # ideally, I want to print the the lines found
}
}
close FILE;
But for some reason, it doesn't seem to like the (\n)'s in the regex. Any help would be appreciated!
This is what I would like to return:
Name: Bob City: Austin State: Texas
Name: Jose City: Denver State: Colorado
Since you've already been shown the super easy way, I'll dare to be a little different:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; use warnings;
$/ = ''; # enter "paragraph" mode
while (<>) { # call with: perl script_name file1
my %contact = map { /^(\w+):\s*(.+)$/ } split /\n/, $_;
print "$_: $contact{$_}\n" foreach qw(Name City State);
print "\n"
}__END__
The first way your were shown is probably a little easier, but this method is probably better if you want to do anything more complicated than simple printing, since you have the whole hash to play with. It's a different way of thinking about the problem at least.
Good luck.
James
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