Good morning,
I'm using a recipe from The Perl Cookbook (11.10 for anyone browsing at
home) to produce a record structure from items in a text file. The text
file itself has a simple structure:
field:value
field:value
field:value
field:value
field:value
etc.
That is, the records are separated by a blank line and they contain
key/value pairs, joined by a colon.
The code I'm working with is this:
$/ = "";
while (<>) {
my @fields = split /^([^:]+):\s*/m;
shift @fields;
push(@Array_of_Records, { map /(.*)/, @fields });
}
It works well to produce an array of hashes, and I can manipulate it from
there without trouble. However, I want to understand this section better.
First question: why does the split command produce a leading null field?
(My best guess is that the regex [^:]+ captures anything that is not a
colon, and that includes a null field?!?)
Second question: what is the map doing in the last line, and why is it
written with // delimiters? (Best guess, it is including everything from
fields within parentheses (forcing the items to be treated as a list?) and
you can't use {} because of the outer {} to create the hash reference?!?)
Sorry if this is very long. I wanted to make sure to include enough
information to make the questions clear.
Thanks in advance, Telemachus
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://learn.perl.org/
