Perl regular expression to capture contents

Question

Below is the script i used to capture the secs

use strict;
use warnings;

my $n='Created posting 187294181 (sny/sny_AF8F46748A50416A9F1FF2BD7) in 0.261 secs';
my $m='Created posting 187294183';


if($n=~/Created\s+(resume|posting)\s+(\d+).*?([\d\.]*)/i)
{
   print "$1 $2 $3\n";
}

Iam getting $3 as blank.Can anyone help me what mistake i have done in the regex to capture secs.Both the $m and $n should match the regex.

Output:

posting 187294181 

Answer 1

Use this regex:

(resume|posting) (\d+)(?:.*?in ([\d.]+) secs)?

In the demo, inspect the capture Groups in the right pane.

In your Perl code:

if ($subject =~ m/(resume|posting) (\d+)(?:.*?in ([\d.]+) secs)?/i) {
   # We matched!
   print "$1 $2";
   # Is Group 3 set? 
   if (defined $3) { print "$3"; }
   print "\n";
}

Explanation

• (resume|posting) captures resume or posting to Group 1.
• (\d+) captures the digits to Group 2.
• (?: opens our optional non-capture group
• .*? lazily matches chars up to ....
• the literal in, then
• ([\d.]+)we capture the time to Group 3
• match literal chars secs
• )? closes the non-capture group and makes it optional