Assign Scalar Variable

Just use the $1 variable, that stores the value first pattern matched inside ().


So:


while (<>) {
     /^.*=(.*)$/;
     print $1;

}


This will check each line against the regular expression once, and print out the part after the =
The ^ indicates the beginning of the line, and the $ indicates the end of the line.  (.*) says to match
as many characters as possible and store that value in $1.

Misread your question.  To assign it to a scalar variable replace


print $1;

with

my $result = $1;

here are the lines of my code
$scalar=/pattern=(.*?)/;
print FH "$scalar \n";

When i view the contents of the FH, tne numeral one appears.

You need to add parentheses.

($scalar) = /something=(.*)/;

FishMonger, I tried that.  The code prints an empty file.

There are many ways to do this. This is the one that I use often:

my $re = qr{(\w+)}/q;   # you can define your pattern here

my @words = ($your_text_line =~ $re);


Hope this helps.

GT

I should have clairfied this, but in addition to adding the parenteses, you also need to remove the question mark or add $ (end of string anchor).  The (.*?) expression says to match any char zero or more times but as few as possibe; which in this case (since you're not using the $ anchor) means zero times.  Here's the test that I ran and it's output.

while (<DATA>) {
   ($scalar) = /pattern=(.*)/;
   print "$scalar\n";
}

__DATA__
the pattern=pattern
the pattern=pattern else
the pattern=another pattern
the pattern=another pattern else


--output--
pattern
pattern else
another pattern
another pattern else

Thanks for the explanation FishMonger.  The code now prints the entire line instead of just the mactched pattern.
Here is the code:
===Begin code.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $file = ">results.txt"; #The results file
my $log = "log.txt"; #The log file
open (FH,$file) || die("Can't open $file\n"); #Open the results file
open(LOG,$log) || die ("Can't open $log\n");# Open the log file
while(<LOG>){   # While the log file is open do
  my $line = $_;  # Define the line as the current line
  chomp $line;  # Remove blank space from end of line
  if (/patternA/){ #
  my ($fromhost) = /fromhost=(.*)/;
  print FH "$fromhost\n";
        }
  }
===End code.pl

If my understanding of what you need is correct, then you could reduce the while loop to this.

while(<LOG>){   # While the log file is open do
   chomp;
   print FH "$1\n" if (/patternA/ && /fromhost=(.*)/);
}

I ran your code against my test data set and it outputed the desired results.  I still didn't see any reason why it printed the entire line for you.  The only difference between your code and my revision of it, is style; they both should produce the same results.

Could have been because I was using cygwin.  I will try it on a Unix platform and let you know how it works.
Thank you.

FishMonger, It was a typo in the script.  As always, thank you for your help.  I appreciate it.

You're welcome...glad i was able to help (with both questions)!

Ron