What I want to do is to take the previous day's logfile, strip out the search phrases and insert these into a mysql db.

Currently using Deep Log Analyser to manually lift the search terms, but I's appreciate some pointers as to how the parsing could be done by a script running overnight.

Suggestions are to where to start?

It all depends, but Perl would be a suitable programming language to knock up a quick and dirty script that will pattern match and insert into your database.

See here for opening file handles:
See here for regular expressions - (Formulate these in order to match the strings you are interested in).
See here for a MySQL database interface in Perl:

There is plenty of information out there. Let me know if you need any help.
Cheers,
ns

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