Thanks very much Tim. I just did a quick test on my real file and it
worked perfectly.
I definitely still have a lot to learn with both Perl and regex's, so I
really appreciate the explanation as well. Though your script is very
compact, I learned a lot from it. Such as how you initialized the array.
I have a couple of scripts where I get warnings about either improper or
uninitialized arrays, or something to that effect. I tried to fix those,
but was unsuccessful. Those scripts produced the output I wanted, but the
warnings are bothersome. I'll take another look at those scripts to see if
initializing using "my @arrayname = ( );" will help.
Also, the "push" structure for adding elements to the array was very
helpful. I have a way to do it, and while my way works and is somewhat
creative, my way is actually really embarrassingly bad and inefficient
coding. So, I learned from that too.
It's funny how all this stuff is in the Perl books that I've been reading,
but once I need to solve a problem, the exact right way to do it doesn't
come to me. I can spend hours trying to do some pretty simple stuff. I
can usually come up with a solution, but I know that it's not usually
efficient nor is it really close to the right way to do it. But, the
good news is, if I think about where my Perl skills are today compared to
a month ago, I'm making progress !
Anyway, sorry for being so looong winded. The bottom line is that I
really appreciate your help.
"Tim Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
01/23/2004 01:32 AM
To
"Tim Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
cc
Subject
RE: Need help with a regex
Ooh. That's embarassing. I didn't pay close enough attention to the OP.
Some of the inside matches contain spaces. My regex should have been:
/^\S+\s+(.+)\s+/
which would match:
* the beginning of the line (^)
* followed by one or more non-whitespace characters (\S+)
* followed by one or more whitespace characters (\s+)
* followed by one or more of any characters including
whitespace (.+)
* followed by one or more whitespace characters (\s+)
because Perl will match the largest possible number of characters, the .+
will match everything between the two outside spaces.
-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Johnson
Sent: Thu 1/22/2004 9:31 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc:
Subject: RE: Need help with a regex
Try this on for size:
#####################
use strict;
use warnings;
my @cities = ();
open(INFILE,"myfile.txt") || die "Couldn't open
myfile.txt for reading!\n";
while(<INFILE>){
$_ =~ /^\S+\s+(\S+)/;
push @cities,$1;
}
#do something to @cities
#####################
which basically means to match:
* the start of the line (^)
* followed by one or more non-whitespace characters
(\S+)
* followed by one or more whitespace characters
(\s+)
* followed by one or more non-whitespace characters
(\S+)
the parentheses around the last non-whitespace match
assign it to $1
Note: Check out "perldoc perlre" for the man pages. It
might be worth looking over real quick before you dig into the book.
Or, for the quick and easy way without a regex, how bout:
#############################
use strict;
use warnings;
my @cities;
open(INFILE,"myfile.txt") || die "Could not open
myfile.txt for reading!\n";
while(<INFILE>){
push @cities,(split /\s+/,$_)[1];
}
#############################
which does a split on the line and returns the second
element of the resulting list and assigns it to @cities.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thu 1/22/2004 9:01 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc:
Subject: Need help with a regex
This newbie needs help with a regex. Here's what
the data from a text
file looks like. There's no delimiter and the
fields aren't evenly spaced
apart.
apples San Antonio Fruit
oranges Sacramento Fruit
pineapples Honolulu Fruit
lemons Corona del Rey Fruit
Basically, I want to put the city names into an
array. The first field,
the fruit name, is always one word with no
spaces.
