Contributed by Anonymous Monk
on Jun 13, 2000 at 22:34 UTC
Q&A
> regular expressions
Description: How do I match something like:
BASKET
OPEC WEEKLY BASKET PRICE RISES TO 28.23 DOLLARS
that is - a single keyword, followed by 2 newlines, followed by a single line of several words terminated by another newline. Answer: How can I match a multi-line regexp? contributed by nuance It's hard to be certain exactly what you're
looking for, I'm going to assume that you are
looking for a specific keyword and that the text
following is fairly free form.
my $keyword = "BASKET";
$data =~ /^($keyword\n\n.+)$/m;
This looks for the keyword followed by two
newlines, and whatever else is on that line. It
will not match if the line following the two
newlines is blank. The m at the end of the
pattern specifies multi-line matching i.e. the $
will match before any newline, not just at the end
of the string.
This answer assumes that $data contains all of
the text you are trying to search, not just a
single line. | Answer: How can I match a multi-line regexp? contributed by athomason You need to tell the regex engine to treat your scalar as a multiline string with the /m option; otherwise it won't attempt to match across newlines. For instance, $_ = "bunch of stuff\nwith target\nstring inside";
print "Found" if /target\nstring/m;
| Answer: How can I match a multi-line regexp? contributed by wesal To overcome the limitation with the quick in-place edit not working on matching the first-line you can remove the -p and do it yourself like:
perl -i.bak -e 'undef $/; $_=<>; s/line1\nline1/new content/g; print' files ..
| Answer: How can I match a multi-line regexp? contributed by markjugg If you want to do a quick in-place edit of a bunch of files, you can use this syntax:
perl -pi.bak -e 'undef $/; s/line1\nline2/new content/' files ..
This will create ".bak" files for every file it operates on. NOTE that it won't find any matches on the first line. If someone knows another one-liner that also matches on the first line, I'm interested to see it. :) |
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