Question

match the subtitle and extract the following paragraph(s)

Asked by: TJ129

Hello,

I would like to match a subtitle (only one line,preceding and following by an empty line) with certain key words in the text file. If there is a match, I want to output either a fixed amount of lines, saying 50, or a fixed number of paragraphs, saying 5 paragraph  to an output file (which one is easier).

Thank you for your help.

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Asked On
2009-10-29 at 11:36:01ID24855698
Tags

perl

,

regular expression

Topic

Perl Programming Language

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: TJ129Posted on 2009-10-29 at 11:38:22ID: 25696760

also post it to the regex zone

 

by: nedfinePosted on 2009-10-29 at 22:29:09ID: 25700349

Please give a sample input file and an example of the match.
Is it a simple txt file input.?

Thanks
Ned

 

by: wilcoxonPosted on 2009-11-25 at 12:12:12ID: 25910704

I think I understand what you are looking for and this should work.  If it does not, please provide an example file and/or more information.

# read the file in
use File::Slurp;
my @lines = read_file('filename');
## alternately, you could do this but it has more overhead but does use less memory
#use Tie::File;
#tie my @lines, 'Tie::File', 'filename' or die "could not tie filename: $!";
my $i = 0;
# loop over the lines in the file
while ($i < @lines) {
    # look for a subtitle (a single line matching keywords with a blank line before and after)
    if ($lines[$i] =~ m{^\s*$} and $lines[$i+1] =~ m{(keyword1|keyword2)} and $lines[$i+2] =~ m{^\s*$}) {
        # print out the 50 lines after the subtitle
        print join("\n", @lines[$i+3..$i+53]), "\n";
    }
    $i++;
}
                                              
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