Question

I’m new to perl and having a problem matching a particular portion of a string.

What I’m trying to match is in bold:

[1339300800] CURRENT HOST STATE: Something;

I was successfully able to match the String between the brackets, at least!

($line=~/\[(\d*)\]*/)

I’m trying something like this for the bolded portion:

($line=~/STATE:\s(\S+);/)

Could anyone give some advice?

Answer 1

Your regex

STATE:\s([^;]*);

Does work for me. Remember that it is matched in group 1

if ($subject =~ m/STATE:\s(\S+);/) {
    $result = $1;
} else {
    $result = "";
}

Also, the first regex can be made a bit less verbose

\[(\d*)]