[TF] Grabbing a chunk of text delimited by prompts

[fbneal at mac.c. (B. Neal)]

I'm beginning to tackle a problem and I was wondering if anyone here 
as seen it/done it before.

What I want to do is take the output of a command, such as an 
inventory list, and pipe it to an external Perl script for 
processing. If necessary, I can get that processed info back using 
/quote.  The real issue I'm having trouble finding a solution for is 
determining when to stop grabbing the output. The way I'm approaching 
it is to write the lines of interest out to a temp file using 
tfwrite(). The lines can be matched easily with a regexp (or even a 
glob) , and I know that I will receive them after entering a specific 
command.  What is not clear is how to tell my writer to stop. The 
only delimiter I have is that I receive a new prompt.  I could put 
something in the prompt hook that disables the writer, but I already 
have a -huge- amount of processing that goes on there, and this will 
be a very infrequently invoked macro. Also, that splits the 
functionality of this macro up over two files (my prompt.tf and the 
file containing the scripts for displaying my inventory in various 
different ways).

Does anyone see a better, simpler way to do this, or has anyone done 
something like this before?

Thanks,

Brent

As an aside:  It'd be tres cool if someone hacked in PCRE support for 
matching. I do a lot of Perl hacking, and having to 'switch gears' to 
write regexps for TF is always mind warping.


-- 
Brent Neal
Geek of all Trades
"Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein