string parsing vs hddtemp question

[Laurent Faillie <l_faillie@...>]

Hello,

A question related to file parsing that drive me nut :(

hddtemp is a tool that is monitoring disk temperature.

With only 1 disk, it expose following string :
    "|/dev/sda|WDC WD5000AAKB-00H8A0|29|C|"

and I've been successfully able to parse it with following code :

    local mnt,tp,temp,unit = string.match( s,
"|(/dev/%a+)|(%a.+)|(%d+)|(%a)")

But with more disk, the string become :
    "|/dev/sda|IBM-ESXSDTN073C1UCDY10F|28|C||/dev/sdb|WDC
WD3200AAJB-00J3A0|43|C||/dev/sdc|Maxtor
34098H4|UNK|*||/dev/sdd|???|ERR|*||/dev/sde|???|ERR|*|"

where sda and sdb are disk whom the temperature can be requested.
sdc is present on the system but it doesn't support temperature query
(too old).
sdd and sde aren't present at the moment.

I would like to iterate against disk exposing their temperature (other
can be ignored) but
    for mnt,tp,temp,unit in s:gmatch("|(/dev/%a+)|(%a.+)|(%d+)|(%a)|") do
        print(mnt, tp)
    end
miserably fails
    /dev/sda    IBM-ESXSDTN073C1UCDY10F|28|C||/dev/sdb|WDC WD3200AAJB-00J3A0
    nil
so it is confused when reading first disk name.

Any idea to parse such strings, being able to iterate b/w each disks
whatever the string contains 1 or more disks ?

Thanks

Laurent

ps: I've been able to get the information by iterating against each
field using "([^|]*)" and then counting next fields to rebuild the
structure. But I'm looking for a more efficient solution