Need Perl help please.

[pwrhouse]

I need help with a script that pulls out everything in between the <Title> and </Title> in an XML document and puts it into a text file.

Thanks for any help I can get.

[gorn]

okay i don't know how much you know or how much help you want...

# first you need to open the file:
open(A, "<file.xml");
#open file.xml for reading

open(TITLES, ">>titles.txt");
#open titles.txt for writting, in append mode as to not wipe it each time this is run.

#now we want to read from it until we get an end of file, or a title tag
while(<A>) {
   if(/<Title>(.*?)</Title>/i) {
   #ahh beautiful regex. i suggest running perldoc perlre so you can read more about it
   # but basicly this says search for <Title> and capture everything in between (.*?)
   # followed by a </Title>. and /i means ignore case
      print TITLES "$1\n";
      last;
      #break out of the loop, only one Title per file.
   }
}

i wrote that just now and didn't test it, but it looks good to me. let me know if you need more help, or help opening all files in a directory or something.

good luck

[Ashcrow]

Are you looking to make it work with the tages?

$ ./doit.pl filename output
DONE!
$ cat output
TITLE: The Title
AUTHOR: Mr. Franklin
COMPANY: Evil Conglomerant International
.....

or just get it as is?

[pwrhouse]

Hi guys, thanks for the help.

Gorn:
I tried what you wrote and I got this error:

Bareword found where operator expected at title_change.pl line 11, near "/<Title>(.*?)</Title"
        (Missing operator before Title?)
Bareword found where operator expected at title_change.pl line 14, near "# followed by a </Title"
  (Might be a runaway multi-line // string starting on line 11)
        (Missing operator before Title?)
syntax error at title_change.p
l line 11, near "/<Title>(.*?)</Title"
Search pattern not terminated at title_change.pl line 14.

I have tried to resolve these problems but I am very very new to perl, any suggestions.

Ashcrow:
The XML file is composed of many HTML pages so the are multiple <Title> tags, what I wanted the script to do is pull out all of the titles and put them into a text file one per line.

I am gonna keep trying to resolve the errors from the script that gorn gave but any other help that someone could give me would be appreciated.

[Ashcrow]

Try this it's mainly gorns code modified a bit. It worked on a small variable set (three titles in XML). If it works I can explain it all to you if you want ....

#!/usr/bin/perl

if( !@ARGV[1] ){

print "\nUsage: pwrhouse inputfile outputfile\n\n";
exit;
}
else {

my $input = @ARGV[0];
my $output = @ARGV[1];

open (FILE, $input) or die $!;
open (TITLES, ">>$output") or die $!;

while(<FILE>) {
if(/<Title>(.*?)<\/Title>/i) {
print TITLES "$1\n";
}
}
}

[gorn]

[quote author=Ashcrow link=board=9;threadid=6108;start=0#58082 date=1042851320]

if(/<Title>(.*?)<\/Title>/i) {

[/quote]

yeah thats what i messed up, forgot to escape the /

[Ashcrow]

[quote author=gorn link=board=9;threadid=6108;start=0#58205 date=1042952064]
yeah thats what i messed up, forgot to escape the /
[/quote]

I'd forget about it more often if it wasn't for 8) VIM 8)

[pwrhouse]

Sorry it took so long to get back to you guys I was out of town.

Anyways thanks alot for your help the script worked like a champ.

You guys both get some karma.