RE: While loop on a file handle

[David Wall]

--On Wednesday, August 06, 2003 2:50 PM +0200 Jenda Krynicky 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

From: "Morrison, Trevor (Trevor)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
What I am trying to do is to process a file that has say 1000 orders
in it all pretty much of the same format.  I want to open up the file,
and then using a while loop go down through all of the order
one-at-a-time and once I have all the fields populated and I have
reached a certain line at the end of each order write the data to the
database.  Then have it all reset, and process the next order; and do
this until the EOF.  That is the goal.
Seems you want something like this (untested of course):

use Switch;

my %order;
while (<IN>) {
        chomp;
        switch ($_) {
                case /^(\w+)\s*: *(.*)/ {$order{lc($1)} = $2}
                case /^ORDER END MARKER/ {
                        save_the_order(\%order);
                        undef %order;
                }
                else {print "Incorrectly formated line $.: $_\n"}
        }
}
This assumes that the order file looks somewhat like this:

        Name: John Doe
        Amount: 10
        Goods: gun XYZ-12345
        Sum: 10100
        ORDER END MARKER
        Name: John Doe
        Amount: 1
        Goods: machinegun ABC-987
        Sum: 2000
        ORDER END MARKER
If it's the case that the end-of-order marker is a constant string, it can 
be a little shorter:

$/="ORDER END MARKER\n";
while (<DATA>) {
   chomp;
   my %order = split /\n|:\s*/;
   save_order( \%order );
}
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