Hi,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>I have a text file with a records like:
>
>smith, James, Dr., 115 Fourth Street, Chicago, IL, 32012, $20.00:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>and another text file with placeholders like:
>
>Hello $last_name, $first_name:
>
>I want to read the first textfile and update the second one.
>
>Any ideas!
This is a very general question. Have you already tried something? Have your read an
Introduction to Perl (O'Reilly's "Learning Perl" is highly recommended)?
Basically, what you have is a data file and a template file. You should open the data
file and read the data into a hash (using pattern matching), then merge the hash and
the template file (replacing your placeholders), putting out a scalar variable for
each set of data. A very simple solution (once you established the hash) could be a
subroutine like this:
my $build_page = sub {
# takes a parameter hash as its argument
my %param = ( @_, );
open TEMPLATEFILE, $templatepath or die "could not open file '$templatepath': $!";
my $template = join '', <TEMPLATEFILE>;
# now replace %%placeholders%% in $template with values from %param hash
$template =~ s{ %% ( .*? ) %% }{ exists( $param{$1} ) ? $param{$1} : ''}gex;
return $template;
}
It is not a good idea to choose strings like $last_name as your placeholders, since
such strings are considered variable names in Perl.
This might not sound too helpful, but if you deliver a piece of code, one of the Perl
wizards on this list will certainly help you.
- Jan
--
If all else fails read the instructions. - Donald Knuth
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