8.5. What's Next?

In the next chapter, you will harness the power of pattern matching by learning Perl's plethora of regular expression metacharacters. You will learn how to anchor patterns, how to search for alternating patterns, whitespace characters, sets of characters, repeating patterns, etc. You will learn about greedy metacharacters and how to control them. You will learn about capturing and grouping patterns, to look ahead and behind. By the time you have completed this chapter, you should be able to search for data by regular expressions based on a specific criterion in order to validate the data and to modify the text that was found.

Exercise 8: A Match Made in Heaven Code View: (sample.file found on CD) Tommy Savage:408–724–0140:1222 Oxbow Court, Sunnyvale,CA 94087:5/19/66:34200 Lesle Kerstin:408–456–1234:4 Harvard Square, Boston, MA 02133:4/22/62:52600 JonDeLoach:408–253–3122:123 Park St., San Jose, CA 94086:7/25/53:85100 Ephram Hardy:293–259–5395:235 Carlton Lane, Joliet, IL 73858:8/12/20:56700 Betty Boop:245–836–8357:635 Cutesy Lane, Hollywood, CA 91464:6/23/23:14500 William Kopf:846–836–2837:6937 Ware Road, Milton, PA 93756:9/21/46:43500 Norma Corder:397–857–2735:74 Pine Street, Dearborn, MI 23874:3/28/45:245700 James Ikeda:834–938–8376:23445 Aster Ave., Allentown, NJ 83745:12/1/38:45000 Lori Gortz:327–832–5728:3465 Mirlo Street, Peabody, MA 34756:10/2/65:35200 Barbara Kerz:385–573–8326:832 Ponce Drive, Gary, IN 83756:12/15/46:268500 1. Print all lines containing the pattern Street. 2. Print lines where the first name matches a B or b. 3. Print last names that match Ker. 4. Print phone numbers in the 408 area code. 5. Print Lori Gortz's name and address. 6. Print Ephram's name in capital letters. 7. Print lines that do not contain a 4. 8. Change William's name to Siegfried. 9. Print Tommy Savage's birthday. 10. Print the names of those making over $40,000. 11. Print the names and birthdays of those people born in June. 12. Print the zip code for Massachusetts.