I've never been that good at regular expressions. What I want to do is parse many log entries for words, ultimately, in SQL like expressions.

For example.

What ultimately I need out of these strings are:

my.my id 
is-relative.to code 
is-relative.to code 
is-mother.to code
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but something like this would be great!

( my.my id >= 1 )
( is-relative.to code = 'sister' )
( is-relative.to code = 'brother' )
( is-mother.to code = 'dog' )
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or

my.my id >= 1 )
is-relative.to code = 'sister'
is-relative.to code = 'brother'
is-mother.to code = 'dog'
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I have been looking a while for hints to an elegant resolution for this problem. There is much dialogue about the use of Text::Balanced but not enough examples in the documentation for my little brain, to help me solve the riddle.

I have an example here that just pulls the expressions, I know what to do from there. I would like some ideas or code examples on a more elegant solution using one of the CPAN modules if that is possible.

What it basically does is:

1. Split the text at the first close parens
2. Parse the expression out of this "before" text
• Remove everything up to and including the last open paren
• Remove any beginning or trailing spaces
3. Split the "after" text this time, and repeat the above operations

Here is a snippet of code that pulls the expressions

$text = "05/04/2010 13:09:45 - A - somebody - ( ( my.my id >= 1 ) ) an
+d ( ( is-relative.to code = 'sister' ) or ( is-relative.to code = 'br
+other' ) or ( is-mother.to code = 'dog' ) )";

my $new = $text;
while ( 1 ) {
   $ind = index($new, ')');

   # Split the text at the first close parens
   $before = substr($new,0,$ind);
   $after = substr($new,$ind);
   last if ( $before eq "" );

   # Clean up the before string
   #  Remove everything up to and including the last open paren
   #  Remove any beginning or trailing spaces
   $before = substr($before,rindex($before,'(')+1);
   $before =~ s/^\s+//;
   $before =~ s/\s+$//;
   push(@list,$before);

   if ( $after =~ /\)/ ) {
      # Disgard chars up to the first open paren
      $after = substr($after,index($after,'(')+1);
      $new = $after;
      print "\n";
  } else {
     last;
  }
}

foreach my $i (@list) {
   print "--".$i."--\n";
}
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