Debbie,
Debbie Christensen wrote:
> I am able to open the file and read it with no problem. Where I get lost is
> My boss wants the data to come out like
> 702 OH, PA, ND
> 703 NJ, NY, CA
There's surely other ways to do this, and many may be better, but here
is a solution for you. It makes use of hashes, and as such may be a
bit mysterious until you get read up. It could be cleaner, but as you
will see, your data was formatted a bit funkily, and I wasn't sure if
that was a typo or purposeful, so I accomodated the funk. :)
----- BEGIN SAMPLE CODE
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
open(STATES, "states.txt") || die "Couldn't open states.txt: $!";
while ($current_line = <STATES>) {
# Remove trailing newline from $current_line
chomp $current_line;
# Split $current_line into two fields
# ( split()'s pattern would've been simpler, but
# I wanted to cover your rather wierdly spaced
# data (see the very end of this code for
# explanation))
($state, $code) = split(/ *: */, $current_line);
# We use a hash to keep track of the data. Key
# is the number code, and the value will be a
# concatenated list of comma-and-space separated state codes.
if ( $seen_state{$code} ) {
$seen_state{$code} = $seen_state{$code} . $state . ', ';
} else {
$seen_state{$code} = $state . ', ';
}
}
close(STATES);
# Now cycle through the %seen_state hash, removing
# trailing comma-and-space from each value, and then
# printing the key and value.
while ( ( $key, $value ) = each %seen_state ) {
chop $seen_state{$key}; # Get rid of the trailing space
chop $seen_state{$key}; # Get rid of the trailing comma
print $key, ' ', $seen_state{$key}, "\n";
}
# And that's all the work; the stuff below is for human
# readers.
=pod
Data in 'states.txt' was taken verbatim from original
posting, and as such, has some strange formatting bits:
---- Begin data ----
OH: 702
PA: 702
ND: 702
NJ :703
NY: 703
CA: 703
---- End data ----
=cut
---- END SAMPLE CODE
And that's it. Hopefully not overwhelming, but it works,
and can serve as a basis for further questions. :)
John
--
John Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
System Administrator, InfoStructure, Ashland OR USA
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