Re: Regular Expression tricky newline problem

[graff]

You've got answers for doing the appropriate regex on the slurped file data, as well as suggestions on improving how you do the slurp, so I'd just like to add that I wouldn't use a whole-file slurp into a scalar in a case like this.

The task appears to be line-oriented, so it would make sense to stick with line-oriented handling of the data. Depending on what else might need to be done with the file contents in the same script (whether you need to do things with other lines besides "Line 3"), you could either read the whole file into an array of lines and use grep on the array, or else use grep directly on the line-oriented file-read operator:

# load file into an array of lines, and use "Line 3":

my @lines = <FILE>;
my ( $keeper ) = grep /^Line 3 : /, @lines;

# or just get "Line 3" from the file, and skip the rest:
#my ($keeper) = grep /^Line 3 : /, <FILE>;

# (update: added parens around $keeper, as per Aristotle's correction)

# either way, remove the unwanted content from the kept line:

$keeper =~ s/Line 3 : //;

[Aristotle]

Careful, you’re invoking grep in scalar context. $keeper will only contain the count of matches. This has to be written with a parenthesised my, like so:

my ( $keeper ) = grep /^Line 3 : /, @lines;

However, that always goes through the entire data, regardless of where the match is found. A better way would be List::Util’s first; with which the context does not matter either:

use List::Util qw( first );

my $keeper = first { /^Line 3 : / } @lines;