Offer Kaye wrote: > Hi all, > I have a text file with columns, where the columns may not be aligned, > and not all lines may have data in all columns: > > header1 header2 header3 header4 > ------------------------------------------------------------ > l1dat1 l1dat2 l1dat3 l1dat4 > l2dat1 l2dat4 > l3veryveryveryverylongdat1 l3dat2 > > As you can see, line1 has all data, line2 is missing clomuns 2 and 3, > line 3 is a mess :) >
Actually line 2 is the mess, line 3 is simple. Line 2 is ambiguous unless there is some way to determine that two columns are missing, for instance is there a maximum column length? How programmatically do you determine that a column is missing. In other words are columns ever no longer than X, or a column with X number of characters will never be followed by more than X space (line 3 is an example of this)? Unless you can tell us how to avoid the ambiguity there really isn't a way to parse it. > Any thoughts on parsing such a "table"? > Please don't offer solutions suggesting to change the way the text > file is written, I have no control over that... > Well you do have control over it, maybe an unexciting, tedious, manual control :-).... > Regards, 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>
