Parsing semi-erratic text

[SamCG]

I'm trying to parse the bodies of some automated emails. One would think it would be easy, but for some reason the generator of the emails does NOT cut lines using a \n, but by adding spaces. The number of spaces added seems to vary.

Initially I broke the email into an array by splitting on \s{15,}, but this isn't ideal, and drops some of the values. I'm considering splitting on the colons, but I'm not convinced this is a great idea and seems to lead to more headaches. Any ideas for a somewhat robust, straightforward way to parse this?

 Security          : BULGY N V-                                       
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 Item Overridden   : Earnings Per Share                               
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 Initial Value     :  (USD)                                           
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 Current Value     :  ()                                              
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 Overridden Value  : 160 (USD)                                        
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 Effective         : 08/20/1999 through 08/20/2000                    
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 Override Type     : Data
 SecurityID        : 1076665
 Sedol             : 2451234
 Cusip             : N66696606
 ISIN              : NL0006122988

Update: Ah, I've found a potential way. while ($bdy=~/(.*?):\s(.*?)\s\s/g) seems to work alright. Comments on this approach?

[ikegami]

The data you submitted *does* have newlines.

while (<DATA>) {
   my ($key, $val) = /^\s*([^:]*?)\s*:\s*(.*?)\s*$/
      or next;

   print("[$key:$val]\n");
}

and

while (<DATA>) {
   my ($key, $val) = split(/:/, $_, 2);
   next if not defined $val;
   s/^\s+//, s/\s+$// for $key, $val;

   print("[$key:$val]\n");
}

both do the trick.

[SamCG]

Hrmm...perhaps an effect of my cutting and pasting? The body of my email gets read into a variable (so it's like slurping a file). I can't seem to split on newlines, and if I use a regex to count I get only one in each email (which I presume is at the end).

Thank you for the implicit character class ([^:]) suggestion, by the way. I hate putting .* into regexes, even with the non-greedy modifier.

[ikegami]

I agree. .* and .*? usually/often assume the data is formatted correctly.

[GrandFather]

Not quite. Consider (note I've trimmed the number of trailing spaces and retained the line ends (but strip them):

use strict;
use warnings;
use Date::EzDate;

my $str = <<DATA;
 Security          : BULGY N V-                         
 Item Overridden   : Earnings Per Share                 
 Initial Value     :  (USD)                             
 Current Value     :  ()                                
 Overridden Value  : 160 (USD)                          
 Effective         : 08/20/1999 through 08/20/2000      
 Override Type     : Data
 SecurityID        : 1076665
 Sedol             : 2451234
 Cusip             : N66696606
 ISIN              : NL0006122988  


DATA

$str =~ s/\n//g;

while ($str =~ /(.*?):\s(.*?)\s\s/g) {
    my ($key, $value) = ($1, $2);
    
    $key =~ s/^\s*//;
    $key =~ s/\s*$//;
    $value =~ s/^\s*//;
    $value =~ s/\s*$//;
    print ">$key: $value<\n";
}

Prints:

>Security: BULGY N V-<
>Item Overridden: Earnings Per Share<
>Initial Value: (USD)<
>Current Value: ()<
>Overridden Value: 160 (USD)<
>Effective: 08/20/1999 through 08/20/2000<
>Override Type: Data SecurityID<
>: 1076665 Sedol<
>: 2451234 Cusip<
>: N66696606 ISIN<
>: NL0006122988<

The regex /(\w[\w ]{17}):\s+((?:(?!\w[\w ]{17}:).)*)/g latches on to a 18 character wide label preceeding a : and then grabs characters upto the next label field. The result is:

>Security: BULGY N V-<
>Item Overridden: Earnings Per Share<
>Initial Value: (USD)<
>Current Value: ()<
>Overridden Value: 160 (USD)<
>Effective: 08/20/1999 through 08/20/2000<
>Override Type: Data<
>SecurityID: 1076665<
>Sedol: 2451234<
>Cusip: N66696606<
>ISIN: NL0006122988<