Stuart Clemons wrote: > > 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.
Hi Stuart. A lot of people have posted the solution split /\s+/, $string; # or similar which is fine, but has the pitfall that if $string contains leading spaces then it will return an initial empty field. The special case split ' ', $string; # (which is also the default) returns just a list of all sets of contiguous non-whitespace characters in $string, which is probably what you want. If your data is well-behaved and never has any leading whitespace then the two are identical, but it's something to beware of as it can cause obscure bugs. HTH (somebody at least) Rob -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
