Regex matching multiple lines

This is a pretty basic question, but i'm trying to match a string on each line and print a portion of the result. The below example is trying to look at each line which is a directory listing with filenames that are dates and print the day. I can only get it to match/print one line.

On your first line you pulled the first value out of <DATA> and put it into $string, then never used it.

In the foreach loop you pulled the second and only remaining value out and performed a regex on it.

The idiomatic way to loop over a file would be with the while operator:

Thanks that works great. Using the while loop how would i get it to kick out non matches?

Example Below




Gives me use of uninitialized value $3 in concatenation for the "test.txt" files.

This quite normal. You've got two errors in your code.

First, if I take your first line of input:



This will obviously not match your regex. You should test if a match occurred before trying to print $3.

For example, you could change your code to:



This will remove the warning you obtained.

The second error is more subtle, as your code will work nonetheless, but not the way you think and may be inefficient. If you count 38 characters from the start of the line, you get to the last digit of the file size. So, the next character is a space, not a digit. The match will nonethless occur because your regex will backtrack so that eventually the ".{38}" will match:



which, even it it works according to your wish, is not really what you expect. Also, this backtracking can be quite inefficient depending on your input (especially when match fails). I would change your regex to something like this:



or



the important point (besides correcting the number of characters before your start of capture) being the start of string anchor at the beginning of the regex, which will prevent useless backtracking.

Awesome. Thank you for the help!