> On Jan 24, 2018, at 11:40 PM, deloptes <delop...@gmail.com> wrote: > > David Christensen wrote: > >> I used to subscribe to Perl Beginners, but the administrator got draconian >> about discussing other languages, I dropped, and now I appear to be >> banned: > > The way you are writing, no wonder you are banned.
Yes -- I'm such an insensitive ass. ;-) > Read once again the original post. Okay, read again. But, I fail to understand how reading the OP's words are related to my insensitivity... >> If you attack the files with raw Perl, you're going to be writing a lexer >> and parser to read the database dump into a data structure, and then doing >> your work against that (perhaps by dumping it to a common format and then >> writing tools against that). If you don't have an EBNF grammar for the >> dump, you'll have to figure it out. Getting the lexer/ parser right, and >> verifying that you got it right, is going to be a lot of work. >> > > you don't know what OP wants to do - OP did not say that The OP said: > On Jan 24, 2018, at 11:14 AM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > > The file is ugly, with lots of extraneous characters--I want to run a series > of > regular expression search and replace commands over the file to clean it up. I've "cleaned up" more files than I care to remember. Lexing, parsing, and EBFN are the standard computer science tools for tasks such as this. (Perl s/// is the road to madness for anything but the most trivial cases.) I wanted to give the OP an idea of what needs to be done and the level of effort involved. > On Jan 24, 2018, at 11:40 PM, deloptes <delop...@gmail.com> wrote: > > David Christensen wrote: > >> 2. Get a tool that understands the dump file (such as the original >> database engine), import the dumps, and then generate queries/ reports/ >> etc. as desired to meet your needs. > > This is probably the best solution to the problem - import the dump and > export in a friendly way Laziness is the first chief virtue of (Perl) programmers [1]. Hopefully, the OP has this option. David [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Larry_wall
