How do I extract lines between two line delimiters in Perl?

Question

I have an ASCII log file with some content I would like to extract. I\'ve never taken time to learn Perl properly, but I figure this is a good tool for this task.

Th

Answer 1

You want the flip-flop operator (better known as the range operator) ..

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;

while (<>) {
  if (/START/../END/) {
    next if /START/ || /END/;
    print;
  }
}

Replace the call to print with whatever you actually want to do (e.g., push the line into an array, edit it, format it, whatever). I'm next-ing past the lines that actually have START or END, but you may not want that behavior. See this article for a discussion of this operator and other useful Perl special variables.