Looking for a bit of help. I need to search for a string of words, but unfortunately these words are located on separate lines.

for example the text output is:

United
Chanmpions
Ronaldo
Liverpool
Losers
Torres


and my script code is

print("DEBUG - checking file message");
while (<FILE>){
$line = $_;

if($line =~ /United/ ){
print("\nAbout to send email\n");
sendEmail($contacts,
"",
"Monitoring",
"\nPlease be aware that there is a problem.",
"",
"");
}

the above script will send out an e-mail when it locates United, but I need to send out an e-mail when it gets United Champions Ronaldo.

I thought something like
if($line =~ /United/n Champions/n Ronaldo/)

But no luck.

Any suggestions as to how to go about this.

$line =~ /(United|Chanmpions|Ronaldo|LiverpoolLosers|Torres)/i

Hi Photon, Thanks for the reply.
But not quite what I am trying to do, I prob could have explained it a bit better.

My problem is that I only want to send out an e-mail if the lines
United
Champions
Ronaldo
occur directly after each other as in.

sample text file

United
Chanmpions
Ronaldo
Liverpool
Losers
Torres


I dont want to send an e-mail just if the words are located in the file for example I dont want to send an e-mail if text file is

United
Champions
Torres
Liverpool
Losers
Ronaldo

as the lines im interested dont occur in the correct order.

$line =~ /[United]?\s?[Chanmpions]?\s?[Ronaldo]?\s?/

The above code is wrong as it is an incorrect use of character classes: [] which match any of the characters inside the square brackets in any order. You can't use them to match whole words, at least not easily or effciently or in the way they are used above. Plus that would also check just one line of the file at a time.

I changed it, point was to use one liner regular expression instead of using hashes and loops and getting all complex. I wish I had the time to test all my code but I am on work time.

Two approaches....

1. Search for any of the words on each line and every time you find one, add it to a hash... e.g. $somehash{"Renaldo"} = 1;

When you've finished scanning the whole file, check the resulting hash for the existence of all the words....

if (exists $somehash{"Renaldo"} && exists $somehash{"loosers"} && exists ... ) { send email ... }

Something like that....

OR....

You could try a pattern like

$FILEBUFFER =~ /(A|B|C|D).+(A|B|C|D).+(A|B|C|D).... /is

You simply repeat the alternatives over and over again separated by one or more of any character, and that way you catch all of them if present no matter what the order.... You have to test the resulting capture to see if all words are present... Note the "is" at the end of the pattern... "i" causes case to be ignored, and "s" says to count a newline as one of the "any characters" which lets you match across lines... Note that in this case $FILEBUFFER contains the WHOLE file (see READ()), not a line....