Question

Is it possible to parse phone call records like the ones bellow with regex:

• 10/07 9:50A 555-111-2489 Peak M2MAllow Anytown NJ Georgetown DE 1 — — —
• 10/08 12:41P 555-111-2489 Off-Peak M2MAllow My Town DE Georgetown DE 15 — — —
• 10/11 11:50A 000-000-0086 Peak PlanAllow,CallVM Anytown NJ Voice Mail CL 1 — — —

Answer 1

Depending what you want, probably? That said, it’s very likely that a regular expression is the Wrong Tool For The Job.

At a glance, it looks like you want something like this – split on spaces the first 5 entries, and the last 5, and everything else is free text. So, in perl, say, it’d look something like this:

while (<>) {
  my ($date, $time, $number, $peak, $plan, @rest) = split ' ', $_;
  # do something with this information
}

But without actually knowing what you are trying to do, this is all just a fancy guess.