> > Help. I'm a frustrated newbie who wants to use Perl to make my life easier. > > The following simple task is only one small part of a program I'm trying to > put together to automate some things I currently do manually. > > I have a file whose format looks like this: > > name1 name2 name3 > name4 name5 name6, etc. > > The names are separated by spaces. I need the names to be one name per > line, like this: > > name1 > name2 > name3, etc. > > I currently use a macro with a text editor to clean up the file into the > one name per line format. I can do this very quickly in contrast to the > the last two hours I've spent trying to figure out how to get Perl to do > this very simple task. Arrggh ! > > To simply things, I just tried to take the following string and print it > out one name per line. > > my $x = "name1 name2 name3"; > > I've tried various schemes using regex's and the ///s operator. Most of > the time I get syntax errors and the few times I get anything to work, it's > not what I want. > > I did get this array structure to work: > > my @names = qw(name1 name2 name3); > print "$names[0] \n"; > print "$names[1] \n"; > print "$names[2] \n"; > > So I then spent time unsuccesfully trying to figure out how to get my > string split into the array. I couldn't get that to work either. More > Arrggh ! > > Anyway, any help at this point will be appreciated. I'm hoping that in the > long run the time I spend learning Perl will pay off, which it will if I > can automate some of the tasks I do manually (with the help of macros in a > text editor). > > My next Perl task after I get my list of one name per line, is to sort the > list and eliminate duplicate names. > > Thanks again for any help.
You are looking initially for the 'split' function. perldoc -f split So for instance your one line above: my $line = "name1 name2 name3"; Can be broken into parts, my @parts = split(/\s+/, $line); The above says to split on one or more whitespace characters and store the result as a list in an array. Then you want to have a go at, perldoc -f push You can then loop over a series of lines storing each of the smaller arrays to a bigger array. That will give you your complete list. For sorting and assuring uniqueness you will want to check out: perldoc -f sort perldoc -f grep perldoc -f map Good luck, don't get frustrated (any more), and I guarantee Perl will open doors that a text editor macro can only dream of (unless we are talking emacs or something, but then we are really talking lisp)... http://danconia.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
