Regular expression search over multiple lines

Question

After considerable search on SO and Google, I resort to posting a new question. I am working with TextWrangler trying to compose a regular expression which will give me shortest matches of a multiple-line pattern.

Basically,

ہے\tVM

is the string I am looking for (an Arabic word separated by a tab character from its part of speech tag). What makes it difficult is that I would like to search for all single sentences containing that string. Here is what I have so far:

/(<Sentence id='\d+'>(?:[^<]|<(?!\/Sentence>))*ہے\tVM(?:[^<]|<(?!\/Sentence>))*<\/Sentence>)/

The files I am looking at are encoded in CML, so part of my question is whether any of you is aware of a CML parser for MAC?

Another obvious alternative is to write a Perl script -- here again, I am thankful for any advice pointing to a simple solution.

---

My current script is:

use open ':encoding(utf8)';
use Encode;
binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");
binmode(STDIN, ":utf8");

my $word = Encode::decode_utf8("ہے");

my @files = glob("*.posn");

foreach my $file (@files) {
    open FILE, "<$file" or die "Error opening file $file ($!)";
    my $file = do {local $/; <FILE>};
    close FILE or die $!;
    if ($file =~ /(<Sentence id='\d+'>(?:[^<]|<(?!\/Sentence>))*$word\tVM(?:[^<]|<(?!\/Sentence>))*<\/Sentence>)/g) {
            print STDOUT "$1\n\n\n\n";
            push(@matches, "$1\n\n");
            }
}

open(OUTPUT, ">matches.txt");
print OUTPUT "@matches";
close(OUTPUT);

Answer 1

You possibly may have more occurrences of the string in the input, so search for all of them...

I believe your code should look like this >>

use open ':encoding(utf8)';
use Encode;

binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");
binmode(STDIN,  ":utf8");

my $word = Encode::decode_utf8("ہے");
my @files = glob("*.posn");
my @matches = ();

foreach my $file (@files) {
  open FILE, "<$file" or die "Error opening file $file ($!)";
  my $file = do {local $/; <FILE>};
  close FILE or die $!;
  my @occurrences = $file =~ /<Sentence id='\d+'>(?:[^<]|<(?!\/Sentence>))*$word\tVM(?:[^<]|<(?!\/Sentence>))*<\/Sentence>/g;
  print STDOUT "$_\n\n\n\n" for (@occurrences);
  push (@matches, "$_\n\n") for (@occurrences);
}

open (OUTPUT, ">matches.txt");
print OUTPUT  "@matches";
close(OUTPUT);

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Learn more about regular expressions here.