How can I match a tab to the end of the line with a Perl regex?

Question

I have a file with the below contents:

After learning everything you've learned so far, 
you may think you've bingo: got a pretty good foundation in 
programming Perl, since you'd already be a good way 
through most of the concepts many other languages entail. 
endbingo: But if you put down 
this book today and did nothing else
bingo: with Perl beyond what I've already taught you, 
you'd miss 
endbingo: thats ok.

I need a Perl regular expression to match the lines "bingo: got a pretty good foundation in" and "bingo: with Perl beyond what I've already taught you"..

In the sense, the word "bingo:followed by a tab, followed by any random set of characters till the end of line".

Answer 1

In multiline mode try:

 \Wbingo:\s.*$

\W means any non alphanumeric char

\s means white char (space, tab, new line)

.* means zero or more random characters

$ means end of line

Answer 2

if by match, you just want to show the lines with "bingo:" and tab onwards, then

perl -ne 'print if /bingo:\s+.+$/' file

if you want to match the word "bingo:" but not "endbingo:", then

$ perl -ne 'print if /\bbingo:\s+.+$/' file
you may think you've bingo: got a pretty good foundation in
bingo: with Perl beyond what I've already taught you,

Answer 3

So it should not match endbingo ? Try this:

/(?<!end)bingo:\s+.*$/

the (?<! is a negative lookbehind and is the proper way to exclude the endbingo without excluding cases where the "bingo:" immediately follows some non-blank text.

Otherwise, if there is always whitespace behind the bingo, just do /\sbingo:\s+(.*)$/

Answer 4

If you are looking a tab and not all white space use the following:

/bingo:\t.*$/

If the line must start with "bingo:" you should use this:

/^bingo:\t.*$/

Answer 5

Since you have not posted any code of your own, I will presume you are not even sure how to begin to construct a Perl regular expression. Here are some resources to get you started.

From the official Perl documentation website:

• perlintro
• perlrequick
• perlretut

I realize that this does not directly answer your question (as others have already done), but perhaps it will help you to converge more quickly on a solution to a future problem.