Perl regular expression guidance

[wildwolf]

Hi all.

I'm trying to whip up a perl script...and it's been a while since I've messed with perl.

I've got a line of text stored in a variable, aptly named $line and I've got a pattern I've defined called $pattern.

I'd like to see if I can find $pattern in the $line.

If my pattern were simple text, such as "abcd" I'd do something like:

if ( $line =~ m/abcd )
{
print "Match found, line contains abcd.";
}

However, I'd like to know if it's possible in Perl to do this:

if ( $line =~ m/$pattern )
{
print "Match found, line contains abcd.";
}

Would there be any constraints if my $pattern had characters I would normally escape with the \?

*edit* sorry about the code...tried to do the attach code..but it doesn't show up in preview...so thought it was lost. No idea how to "remove" the attached code block either.

 

[notfred]

You can stick patterns in variables exactly as if you copied and pasted them out of m/pattern/.

Example:

 

[wildwolf]

Yeah. I think I realized where my problem really stems from.

I got that working...which lead me to find the root of my problem: I am trying to open a file read each line, do some processing on it, and proceed to the next line.

How do I proceed to the next line if, during any part of processing the current line, I wish to stop with that line and just go to the next one?

I opened the file with a standard open(myFile, "<filename".
I then used a (see code).


In the (get next line here)....how do I accomplish this...cause what I'm attempting isn't working. I thought my regex pattern was failing...it wasn't. It matched, just never got the to the next line to search for the string again.

 

[notfred]

the perl "next" keyword will stop the current iteration of a loop and go directly to the next one.

while($something){
# do stuff
next;
# stuff that doesn't get done because "next" forced the next iteration of the loop without running it.
}

 

[jgbishop]

I believe that a call to <myFile>, in the (get next line here) section, will do what you want. So, in your while loop:

$line = <myFile>;
print "$line\n";
etc...

 

[wildwolf]

Originally posted by: jgbishop
I believe that a call to <myFile>, in the (get next line here) section, will do what you want. So, in your while loop:

$line = <myFile>;
print "$line\n";
etc...

That's what I needed/used. Works great. Thanks. Man...I really enjoy Perl....got an awesome parsing tool with less than 40 lines of code.