Question

Perl beginner with a question on regular expressions.

The code below successfully gets the webpage contents from my website.
Then, I check for a match to the pattern “search type: [Dir or Geo]”. That bit I just wrote is not the actual regex code, but text to show what I want to match.

Here’s an excerpt of what the get method actually captures (sorry, not enough reputation points yet to post images):

        what: movers<br/>
        where: toronto<br/>

            search type:
             Dir <br/>

between “search type:” and “Dir” there are tabs and spaces and that paragraph character you see in Word docs (right after the word “type:”.

Below is my code.

use strict;
use warnings;
use WWW::Mechanize;
my $searchtype = "nothing yet";
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
my $webpage;
$mech->credentials('user','password' );
foreach my $keyword qw(movers) {
    print "\$keyword = $keyword\n";
    my $url = "http://myurl";
    $mech->get($url);
    $webpage = $mech->content();
    if ($webpage =~ /search type.+([A-Z][a-z][a-z])/) {
        $searchtype = $1;
        print "$searchtype\n";
    }
}

So, why won’t my regular expression $webpage =~ /search type.+([A-Z][a-z][a-z])/ capture the “Dir” in the match variable $1?

Driving me nuts.

Louie

Answer 1

/./ matches any character except newlines unless you use /./s. Since you want to match the newline, you’d have to add /s.

/search type.+([A-Z][a-z][a-z])/s

But that would find the last three letters of the document. You actually want

/search type:\s+([A-Z][a-z][a-z])/