Re: Regular expressions

[GrandFather]

Two problems:

Missing space in <!--Start_of_revision-->

if rather than while

A working version of your code in a form that is better for stand alone testing is:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $text = join "", <DATA>;
while($text =~ /<!-- Start_of_revision-->(.*?)<!-- End_of_revision-->/
+sg)
    {
    print $1;
    }
    
__DATA__

<!-- Start_of_revision-->
revision1
<!-- End_of_revision-->

<!-- Start_of_revision-->
revision2
<!-- End_of_revision-->

<!-- Start_of_revision-->
revision3
<!-- End_of_revision-->

revision1

revision2

revision3

[ikegami]

That's an aweful way of reading a file. It means every line must be pushed onto the stack. The OP's method was better, and the following is even better because it avoids a call to stat and works will all kinds of IO handles:

my $text; { local $/; $text = <DATA>; }

Visually, I prefer
my $text = do { local $/; <DATA> };
but I think I determined the above is equivalent to
my $text; { local $/; my $temp = <DATA>; $text = $temp; }

[GrandFather]

The reason I am a monk is to learn from the masters. I keep forgetting about $/! I hope I have learned :). Thank you.