PERL Beginners - Searching for a pattern that spans for more than one line

Author

Searching for a pattern that spans for more than one line

beluchin@gmail.com

2006-09-29, 6:57 pm

Does any one know a perl one-liner that allows me to print all the
matches of a pattern that spans more than one line on a file?

For example: the pattern is "Hello.*$.*World" and the file is text.txt

[text.txt]
Hello is on the first line
and World on the second
the third has neither
and Hello is also on the fourth
fifth
the sixth also contains Hello plus something else
World also appears on this last line
[end]

matches
1.
Hello is on the first line
and World on the second

2.
the sixth also contains Hello plus something else
World also appears on this last line

It would be sufficient to display either:
- the line number of the first line of each match or
- the entire first line of each match or
- all the lines that involved in the match or
- just whether a match exist.

Thanks.

Paul Lalli

2006-09-29, 6:57 pm

beluc...@gmail.com wrote:
> Does any one know a perl one-liner that allows me to print all the
> matches of a pattern that spans more than one line on a file?
>
> For example: the pattern is "Hello.*$.*World" and the file is text.txt

Look up the -0 and -n options in
perldoc perlrun
and the /s modifier of regular expressions in
perldoc perlretut

Once you've made an attempt, if it doesn't work the way you want, let
us know what you've tried and we can help you fix it.

Paul Lalli

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