http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=949286


in reply to Re^4: Extract lines between two patterns
in thread Extract lines between two patterns

I want to extract lines between Pattern1 and Pattern2 and write it into file2

untested

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; our $fh; our $log; open($fh,"<","block.power"); open ($log,">","temp.log") or die "can not open file $log : $!\n" ; while($fh){ if (/Pattern1>(.*?)<Pattern2/) { print $log $1; } } close $fh; close $log;

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Re^6: Extract lines between two patterns
by kielstirling (Scribe) on Jan 23, 2012 at 04:56 UTC
    Hi,

    What you are doing will fail. When you slurp in a file using a while loop it is read in a line at a time.

    You also need to add < an > around your file handle. In your example you are testing if $fh is defined. Your code will never break out of the loop. In the following code I open the input file, loop over it looking for the start pattern and then end pattern. I then use a var to toggle true/false Not the best way to do this however it works.

    -Kiel R Stirling
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; open IN, "/tmp/p.txt" or die $!; open OUT, ">/tmp/temp.log" or die "can not open file log : $!\n" ; my $start = 0; while(<IN>){ if (/<Pattern1/) { $start = 1; next; } elsif (/<Pattern2/) { $start = 0; next; } print OUT if $start; } close IN; close OUT;
      Thanks to all of you for your help. Based on your guidance i managed to get my code work. I'm posting my code below. #!/usr/bin/perl #use strict; #use warnings; my $fh; my $log; my $line; open($fh,"<","file1") or die "can not open file $fh : $!\n" ; open ($log,">","file2")or die "can not open file $log : $!\n" ; while($line = <$fh>) { if ($line =~ /pattern1/ ) { printf $log $line; while($line = <$fh>) { if($line =~ /pattern2/) { printf $log $line; last; } else { printf $log $line; } } } } close $fh; close $log; Happy to take your advice to make this code more efficient.
        Hi If you want to make this more general like you don't know what point you are using and need to use flags how do you do that?