perlquestion pbeckingham <p> Can someone help? I have given myself the challenge of doing some simple parsing, but in a complex way. Without focusing on why I choose to do this, can someone guide me towards a viable solution? Given the following input: <code> name1=value1 name2 = value2 </code> This code parses it: <code> while (<$input>) { chomp; next if /^ \s* #/; next if /^ \s* $/; if (/^ \s* ([^=\s]+) \s* = \s* (.+) $/x) { # name is in $1, value is in $2 } } </code> That's not the question though. The question is, how would I parse the following: <code> name1=value1 name2 = value2 name3 = value3 but wait, there is more name4= value4 </code> With Perl that has the form: <code> my $contents = do {local $/; <$input>}; while ($contents =~ / ANSWER_HERE /msg) { # name is in $1, value is in $2 } </code> Specifically, I want to use the //g form, to iterate over the string, and not perform a line-by-line parse, as in the first example. My attempts have thus far failed. The closest I got (without success) was: <code> my $contents = do {local $/; <$input>}; my $name = qr/\s* [^=\s]+ \s*/x; while ($contents =~ /^ ($name) = \s* (.+) (?= ^ $name = | $ ) /msgx) { # name is in $1, value is in $2 } </code> </p> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-329777"> <br /><br /><font size="-3">pbeckingham - typist, perishable vertebrate.</font> </div></div>