How can I extract substrings from a string in Perl?

Question

Consider the following strings:

1) Scheme ID: abc-456-hu5t10 (High priority) *****

2) Scheme ID: frt-78f-hj542w (Balanced)

3) Scheme ID: 23f-f974-nm54w (super formula run) *****

and so on in the above format - the parts in bold are changes across the strings.

==> Imagine I've many strings of format Shown above. I want to pick 3 substrings (As shown in BOLD below) from the each of the above strings.

• 1st substring containing the alphanumeric value (in eg above it's "abc-456-hu5t10")
• 2nd substring containing the word (in eg above it's "High priority")
• 3rd substring containing * (IF * is present at the end of the string ELSE leave it )

How do I pick these 3 substrings from each string shown above? I know it can be done using regular expressions in Perl... Can you help with this?

Answer 1

You could do something like this:

my $data = <<END;
1) Scheme ID: abc-456-hu5t10 (High priority) *
2) Scheme ID: frt-78f-hj542w (Balanced)
3) Scheme ID: 23f-f974-nm54w (super formula run) *
END

foreach (split(/\n/,$data)) {
  $_ =~ /Scheme ID: ([a-z0-9-]+)\s+\(([^)]+)\)\s*(\*)?/ || next;
  my ($id,$word,$star) = ($1,$2,$3);
  print "$id $word $star\n";
}

The key thing is the Regular expression:

Scheme ID: ([a-z0-9-]+)\s+\(([^)]+)\)\s*(\*)?

Which breaks up as follows.

The fixed String "Scheme ID: ":

Scheme ID: 

Followed by one or more of the characters a-z, 0-9 or -. We use the brackets to capture it as $1:

([a-z0-9-]+)

Followed by one or more whitespace characters:

\s+

Followed by an opening bracket (which we escape) followed by any number of characters which aren't a close bracket, and then a closing bracket (escaped). We use unescaped brackets to capture the words as $2:

\(([^)]+)\)

Followed by some spaces any maybe a *, captured as $3:

\s*(\*)?

Answer 2

You could use a regular expression such as the following:

/([-a-z0-9]+)\s*\((.*?)\)\s*(\*)?/

So for example:

$s = "abc-456-hu5t10 (High priority) *";
$s =~ /([-a-z0-9]+)\s*\((.*?)\)\s*(\*)?/;
print "$1\n$2\n$3\n";

prints

abc-456-hu5t10
High priority
*

Answer 3

(\S*)\s*\((.*?)\)\s*(\*?)


(\S*)    picks up anything which is NOT whitespace
\s*      0 or more whitespace characters
\(       a literal open parenthesis
(.*?)    anything, non-greedy so stops on first occurrence of...
\)       a literal close parenthesis
\s*      0 or more whitespace characters
(\*?)    0 or 1 occurances of literal *

Answer 4

Well, a one liner here:

perl -lne 'm|Scheme ID:\s+(.*?)\s+\((.*?)\)\s?(\*)?|g&&print "$1:$2:$3"' file.txt

Expanded to a simple script to explain things a bit better:

#!/usr/bin/perl -ln              

#-w : warnings                   
#-l : print newline after every print                               
#-n : apply script body to stdin or files listed at commandline, dont print $_           

use strict; #always do this.     

my $regex = qr{  # precompile regex                                 
  Scheme\ ID:      # to match beginning of line.                      
  \s+              # 1 or more whitespace                             
  (.*?)            # Non greedy match of all characters up to         
  \s+              # 1 or more whitespace                             
  \(               # parenthesis literal                              
    (.*?)            # non-greedy match to the next                     
  \)               # closing literal parenthesis                      
  \s*              # 0 or more whitespace (trailing * is optional)    
  (\*)?            # 0 or 1 literal *s                                
}x;  #x switch allows whitespace in regex to allow documentation.   

#values trapped in $1 $2 $3, so do whatever you need to:            
#Perl lets you use any characters as delimiters, i like pipes because                    
#they reduce the amount of escaping when using file paths           
m|$regex| && print "$1 : $2 : $3";

#alternatively if(m|$regex|) {doOne($1); doTwo($2) ... }     

Though if it were anything other than formatting, I would implement a main loop to handle files and flesh out the body of the script rather than rely ing on the commandline switches for the looping.