[vbsaltydog]

I am trying to extract text from a file based on conditions and I am a noob so I am asking for help again.

I dont need help with setting the conditions right now but rather how do I write a perl script that acts upon the contents of a seperate file and outputs to a new file?

Ex. script name is script.pl and text to read and act upon is in file.txt and output file is output.txt.
All files are in the same directory.

Thanks again for your help,

-vbsaltydog

[vbsaltydog]

I figured out how to access the file contents with the open and close functions and I got the lines of text stored into an array and printed them out using a foreach statement but now how do I get it to only print text that matches a pattern? and how do I output the results to a file?

Thank to everyone for your help.

-vbsaltydog

[Drunken Perl Coder]

please post the code you have so far. Explain what the considtions are. Post some sample data if possible.

[vbsaltydog]

The goal is to read the code in the file being opened and output only the text strings that match the regular expression of /<b>anything</b>/ to a new file.

Here is the current code:
__________________________________________________ __________

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

open(SOURCE,      "file") || die("can't open file: $!");

@array = <SOURCE>;

close SOURCE;

foreach $line (@array) {

print $line;

} # End of foreach.

__________________________________________________ ________

Thanks for your help,

-vbsaltydog

[Drunken Perl Coder]

one possibility:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
open(IN, "infile") or die "can't open infile: $!";
open(OUT, ">outfile") or die "can't open outfile: $!";
@array = <IN>;
close(IN);
foreach $line (@array) {
   print OUT $line if ($line =~ /<b>.*?<\/b>/);
}
close(OUT);

if the input file is too big to fit into memory:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
open(IN, "infile") or die "can't open infile: $!";
open(OUT, ">outfile") or die "can't open outfile: $!";
while(my $line = <IN>) {
   print OUT $line if ($line =~ /<b>.*?<\/b>/);
}
close(IN);
close(OUT);

or as a command line / one liner:

Code:

perl -n -e "print if /<b>.*?<\/b>/" infile >outfile

[vbsaltydog]

Thanks for the response. It worked well.
How can I set the regex to match no more than 5 words?

-vbsaltydog

[Drunken Perl Coder]

Originally Posted by vbsaltydog

Thanks for the response. It worked well.
How can I set the regex to match no more than 5 words?

-vbsaltydog

Explain better please. Post some sample data and show what you want the results to be.

[vbsaltydog]

Its OK, I figured out how to do it by using the [0,50] inside the regex so it matches at least one character but not more than 50 characters.

Your willingness to help is appreciated.

-vbsaltydog