http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=180952

ChOas has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

A collegue of mine is working on parsing a file, which
is part of a database... The person that wrote this
database has kinda screwed up, because he/she used 1 field
for 3 values, I`ll explain:

In The Netherlands, a surname CAN be prepended by (amongst
others) one of the following:
'VAN DER','VAN DE','DEN','DE','VAN' ...
I have no clue what this is called in English, but
I would like to call it a 'prependition' :)

Anyways... The fields in every line are:

NAME<Mandatory> PREPENDITION<maybe> HAVENT_GOT_A_CLUE<maybe>

I wanted to help, and I`ve tried different ways to parse
this, and I only have a little sample data, but I came up
with this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $Prep_Re=join '|',('VAN DER','VAN DE','DEN','DE','VAN'); print "Name\t\tPrependition\t\tWhatever\n"; while (<DATA>) { chomp; s/\s{2,}/ /g; my ($Name,$Prep,$Unknown); ($Name,$Prep,$Unknown)=($`,$1,$') if (/ ($Prep_Re)/); ($Name,$Unknown)=($`,$1) if ((!$Name)&&(/ (\S*?$)/)); $Prep||=''; print "$Name\t\t$Prep\t\t$Unknown\n"; }; __DATA__ WINTER DE <A240> ZANDEN VAN DER ŤAť JENSEN 230 WOODHEAD <D> BRINK 130,- HEYDIER DEN <240> SMITSER (4X115PJ) LINDEN VAN DER MOTEL GOLDEN LEEUW <A225>

It works for my sample data, but I can already think of
cases where it won`t work... and... I have a gut-feeling
this can be done better (I`m not a regex-wiz) ...

Any pointers ?

GreetZ!,

print "profeth still\n" if /bird|devil/;