Question

I have a text file which contains names enclosed in single quotes. How do i do a regex to get all the names the text contains ?

- "Lady of Spain" (uncredited)
  Music by 'Tolchard Evans' (qv)
  Lyrics by 'Robert Hargreaves (II)' (qv), 'Stanley Damerell' (qv) and 'Henry B. Tilsley' (qv)
  Performed by 'Jack Haig' (qv) and 'Kenneth Connor' (qv)

Here is what I could come up with.

/(\'(.*)\')*/

However, the period matches only till the newline. so i modified the regex to include

/(\'(.*)\'.*(\n|\r\n)*)*/

But its still not wokring. Please help me figure out why my regex isnt working.

Answer 1

I’d use split instead:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp();
    @values = split(/('.*?')/);
    foreach my $val (@values) {
         print "$val\n" if ($val =~ m/^'/)
    }
}

__DATA__
- "Lady of Spain" (uncredited)
  Music by 'Tolchard Evans' (qv)
  Lyrics by 'Robert Hargreaves (II)' (qv), 'Stanley Damerell' (qv) and 'Henry B. Tilsley' (qv)
  Performed by 'Jack Haig' (qv) and 'Kenneth Connor' (qv)

outputs:

'Tolchard Evans'
'Robert Hargreaves (II)'
'Stanley Damerell'
'Henry B. Tilsley'
'Jack Haig'
'Kenneth Connor'