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How can I pull out lines between two patterns that



Jasmine
Administrator

Mar 15, 2001, 5:55 AM


Views: 33946
How can I pull out lines between two patterns that
How can I pull out lines between two patterns that are themselves on different lines?

You can use Perl's somewhat exotic .. operator (documented in ]url=http://www.perlguru.com/perldocs/5.005_02/pod/perlop.html]the perlop manpage):

Code
    perl -ne 'print if /START/ .. /END/' file1 file2 ...
If you wanted text and not lines, you would use

Code
    perl -0777 -pe 'print "$1\n" while /START(.*?)END/gs' file1 file2 ...
But if you want nested occurrences of START through END, you'll run up against the problem described in the question in this section on matching balanced text.

Here's another example of using ..:

Code
    while (<>) { 
        $in_header =   1  .. /^$/; 
        $in_body   = /^$/ .. eof(); 
        # now choose between them 
    } continue { 
        reset if eof();         # fix $.