Separating substrings from a main string

[newbie1991]

I am trying to separate a repeated substring from a really long string. I cannot use the offset numbers because they are all variable length. I want to split into substrings using particular delimiters, for example, (code given below), I want the parts from > to the first \n after the > in one string, and \n to the next > in another string. Using split seems way too cumbersome and would need too many statements. Substr function requires length or offset, but they are variable. Is there a shorter way?

"> abcd1234
abcd abcd 
>xyz123 
xyz"

[blue_cowdawg]

my $string=qq(> abcd1234
abcd abcd 
>xyz123 
xyz);
$string =~s/[\s\n]+//g;  #squash out the whitespace and newlines
my @f=split(/[\>]/,$string;
# CAVEAT: just wrote the off the top of my head...

Give that a whirl.

[newbie1991]

this works, but only for the first instance. As in, @f is >abcd1234, but the correct output should be >abcd1234 >xyz123 Would it be more convenient if $string was an array?

[blue_cowdawg]

I gave you a template. If you have other requirements please engage your creativity and modify the template to suit you. Here's one way:

$ cat splitter.pl 
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $foo=qq(> abcd1234
abcd abcd 
>xyz123 
xyz);
$foo =~ s/\n//g;

my @f = split(/[\>]/,$foo);

$_ = '>' . $_ foreach @f;

print Dumper(\@f);



$ perl splitter.pl
$VAR1 = [
          '>',
          '> abcd1234abcd abcd ',
          '>xyz123 xyz'
        ];

[Athanasius]

Another approach (using a regex, and assuming you want to keep the whitespace):

#! perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = <<END;
> abcd1234
abcd abcd 
>xyz123 
xyz
END

if ($string =~ />(.*?)\n(.*?)>/s)
{
    print "First  substring is '$1'\n";
    print "Second substring is '$2'\n";
}

Output:

 0:23 >perl 497_SoPW.pl
First  substring is ' abcd1234'
Second substring is 'abcd abcd
'

 0:23 >

Hope that helps,

[Kenosis]

Were you looking for something like the following?

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my $string = "> abcd1234
abcd abcd 
>xyz123 
xyz";


my @substrings = $string =~ /(>.+)/g;

print Dumper \@substrings;

Output

$VAR1 = [
          '> abcd1234',
          '>xyz123 '
        ];

In your original posting, you say you ...want the parts from > to the first \n after the > in one string, and \n to the next > in another string. Yet that would yield:

$VAR2 = [
          '> abcd1234',
          'abcd abcd'
        ];

However, in a reply you say, ...the correct output should be >abcd1234 >xyz123..., and, assuming these are two different strings, this is the output from the above script.