Hello all.

I have a text file that is in the format like below. A general city phone book.
There are two basic formats. 1) which has the phone extension and 2) which doesn't.

1) Amador, Jodi - Clerk Typist, Fire 4-4976 44976
2) Amicangelo, Michael D. - Utilities Engineer, WWTP 971-4834

I would like to write a script that creates a text file with the persons full name and phone number only. No locations, titles or extensions.

I will then use the file to create a database

I would like to throw in a ; to use as a delimiter.

The results should look like this

Amador, Jodi; 4-4976
Amicangelo, Michael D.; 997-4834

I am not that experienced with regular expressions.
I am a beginner perl programmer.
Please point me in some direction. Thanks
Jeem

At a guess:


It's likely to need tweaking.

I guess I'm more of a beginner than I thought. I get lost right after the regex. I'm not sure how to use this in a program. I will check my books. Thanks and I'll let you know if it works. Any other responses to Pauls reply would be very appreciated.
Thanks
Jim

You'd open the original file, loop it, then add my line which would print to the new file - something like this:

i think it should be



or, did I miss something?

Yeah my fault. I was originally using [^-]+ and then decided to change it but forgot to remove the ^

Thank you all very much.