Using Regex to capture content after first occurrence of a string - regex

Question

I've done some research and I'm struggling to figure out how to answer this question. I have the following text and I want to extract the zip code in the business address field:
BUSINESS ADDRESS:
STREET 1: 101 AWESOME DRIVE
STREET 2: P O BOX 144
CITY: HOUSTON
STATE: TX
ZIP: 77027
BUSINESS PHONE: [phone]
MAIL ADDRESS:
STREET 1: P O BOX 144
CITY: HOUSTON
STATE: TX
ZIP: 77001
This code captures the last instance (77001):
(BUSINESS\s*ADDRESS:)(.*)(ZIP:\s*)(.*)
How can I capture the first zip code (77027)?
Thanks for helping a noob.

Answer 1

Well, in your example you just need to add question mark to (.*?) and specify that zip consists only digits:
BUSINESS\s*ADDRESS:.*?ZIP:\s*(\d+)
By default asterisk and plus are greedy.
And no need to capture things other than zip code

Answer 2

Given:
my $tgt="BUSINESS ADDRESS:
STREET 1: 101 AWESOME DRIVE
STREET 2: P O BOX 144
CITY: HOUSTON
STATE: TX
ZIP: 77027
BUSINESS PHONE: [phone]
MAIL ADDRESS:
STREET 1: P O BOX 144
CITY: HOUSTON
STATE: TX
ZIP: 77001";
You can do:
print "$1: $2\n" while $tgt=~/^(\S[^:]+):[^\R]*\R.*?^\s+ZIP:\s+(\d+)/gms;
Prints:
BUSINESS ADDRESS: 77027
MAIL ADDRESS: 77001
Same method you can construct a hash mapping the address to the zip for each block.

Answer 3

The match operator running in list context will return all the matching values that were found. So you could do something like this:
my $data = '
BUSINESS ADDRESS:
STREET 1: 101 AWESOME DRIVE
STREET 2: P O BOX 144
CITY: HOUSTON
STATE: TX
ZIP: 77027
BUSINESS PHONE: [phone]
MAIL ADDRESS:
STREET 1: P O BOX 144
CITY: HOUSTON
STATE: TX
ZIP: 77001
';
my #allzips = ($data =~ /ZIP:\s*(\d+)/g);
foreach my $zip (#allzips) {
print "Found ZIP: $zip\n";
}
Which prints:
Found ZIP: 77027
Found ZIP: 77001

Answer 4

For those about to awk...
There is a tested version below, given that the file is named test.txt in current directory:
awk '{if ($0 ~ /BUSINESS ADDRESS:/) { inzone=1; } if (inzone) {if ($0 ~ /ZIP:/) { print $2; } else if ($0 ~ /MAIL ADDRESS:/) { inzone=0; }}}' test.txt
It will print the second field for all lines containing ZIP:, but only the lines encountered in a block between a line containing BUSINESS ADDRESS: and another line containing MAIL ADDRESS:
The test is below:
awk '{if ($0 ~ /BUSINESS ADDRESS:/) { inzone=1; } if (inzone) {if ($0 ~ /ZIP:/) { print $2; } else if ($0 ~ /MAIL ADDRESS:/) { inzone=0; }}}' test.txt
77027