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Author Expect: matching the nearer of two possible matches
korinthe

2007-02-21, 7:15 pm

First off, apologies if there is something like comp.lang.tcl.expect
out there. I couldn't find it.

I've written an expect script to process a text file that contains
captured output from an interactive session. (The idea is to reuse
code, when I get around to doing the same tasks in the future.) I've
run into a problem that is probably a result of using the capture file
rather than an interactive session with the server. Hoping someone has
a good idea about how to tackle this.

The capture file looks something like this:
> [command to server]

[output from command, header line followed by arbitrary number of
lines]

over and over. I have to capture info from each line of the response,
yet my expect script doesn't know how many lines there will be. I
can't go till EOF, because I still need to capture the info from the
header line of each response.

I think I need a kind of look-ahead expect() that doesn't actually eat
the lines, and that would tell me which of two possible patterns
matched *nearest* to the current position. Does something like this
exist?

Another option would be telling expect() to only try to match within a
certain number of chars. I know the max possible line length. But I
couldn't find evidence of this in the documentation.

Thanks for any ideas you can share.

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