note
graff
You don't seem to understand what [GrandFather]'s code is doing. In particular, this chunk of code determines how the original line of text is divided into tag-able pieces:
<c>
my ($bibData, $quote, $primary, $sec) = /
^([^"]* "[^"]+"[^"]*)
([^\@]+)
\@([^%]+)
\%(.*)
/x;
</c>
That's a regex, expressed on multiple lines (thanks to the "x" modifier at the end), where the first line captures everything <strike>up through the first close-quote</strike> <i>up to the second open-quote</i>, and the second line captures everything from that point up to the first "@" (keyword symbol).
<P>
To get the date as a separate item, you just need to divide up the match a little differently, like this:
<c>
my ($bibData, $date, $quote, $primary, $sec) = /
^([^"]* "[^"]+".*?)
(\d{4})\.\s+
([^\@]+)
\@([^%]+)
\%(.*)
/x;
$xml->startTag('entry');
$xml->dataElement(bib => $bibData);
$xml->dataElement(date => $date);
$xml->dataElement(quote => $quote);
$xml->dataElement(primary => $primary);
$xml->dataElement(sec => $sec);
$xml->endTag();
</c>
Note how the first capture changed: it now ends with <c>.*?</c> to do a "non-greedy" match of any character until the next capture match is found, which is the one I added to look for 4 digits followed by a literal period and whitespace (updated to require at least one whitespace character). Then we also have to add a $date variable to the list of assignments, as well as a the <c>$xml->dataElement()</c> call to include the $date value in the output.
<P>
Bear in mind that if your input ever includes a line of text like this, the method above will do the wrong thing:
<c>
"Big Brother." Review of Orwell's Novel 1984. Nov. 2011. "Tough situation." @tricky %unparsable.
</c>
That could be "fixed" by making the regex match more explicit -- e.g. looking for any of the 12 month abbreviations before the 4-digit year -- but then some entries might lack a month, or the month will be unabbreviated or misspelled...
<P>
Any attempt to impose structure like this on plain text has a non-zero probability of failing, because it's impossible to anticipate all the unexpected variations that eventually show up in (human-authored) plain text.
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