Regular Expressions and how they hate me

[Phalse]

hello all, I am having trouble with some regular expressions.
Here is a file format that I have:

SECTION         Test
Comp                  1
Comp                  2
Frame                 1
Frame                 2
SECTION        Test2
Comp                  1
(..etc..)

What I need is a regular expression that just pulls out each section, so the first match would be everything from SECTION to SECTION.

I am terrible at regular expressions and I am not sure how to get this done. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.

[mostafaxx]

what is the programing language you're coding in ??

[Phalse]

A regex should be pretty universal, I am using Expresso as the designer tool.

[ABS]

Regex can actually be very different from one implementation to another. I wrote this up real quick using GNU sed. Which I believe has a syntax very similar to perl, your mileage may vary in other languages.

the contents the test file is:

$~/temp> cat file 
SECTION         Test
Comp                  1
Comp                  2
Frame                 1
Frame                 2
SECTION        Test2
Comp                  1
Frame                 1
Frame                 2

And here is my round about way of doing it:

$~/temp> sed -n '/^SECTION\s\+Test/,/^SECTION\s\+Test/ s/\(.\+\s\+[0-9]\+\)/\1/p' file
Comp                  1
Comp                  2
Frame                 1
Frame                 2

To grab section Test2:

$~/temp> sed -n '/^SECTION\s\+Test2/,/^SECTION\s\+Test/ s/\(.\+\s\+[0-9]\+\)/\1/p' file
Comp                  1
Frame                 1
Frame                 2

There are probably other better ways, but that's what I came up with off the top of my head.

The gist of what I'm doing is this:

Match from ^SECTION\s\+Test to ^SECTION\s\+Test and then do a substitution for the pattern \(.\+\s\+[0-9]\+\) which gets stored in address space \1 (perl would call that $1), then print what is in \1, that way we get just the contents withing the matching section. The sed '-n' option tells it not to print anything unless we explicitly tell it to.

[Phalse]

ah, great thanks ABS. I'll give that a shot.