Hi, What i find challenging in perl is the "automagic" that enables a little code to do a lot. I was looking at a book "Data Munging with Perl" by David Cross. I've used perl in the past but I forget most of it after a while and then relearn it when I need to use it again...In any event (I wish I retained knowledge better) the very first script in the book would be used on a file like, (assume tab delimited)
band1 song1 aaa 1999 band2 song2 bbb 1966 band3 song3 cccc 1988 band4 song4 dddd 1964 band5 song5 eee 1988 and the given code to get the number of CDs per year is: my %years; open FILE, "untitled" or die $!; while (<FILE>) { chomp; my $year = (split /\t/)[3]; $years{$year}++; } foreach (sort keys %years) { print "In $_, $years{$_} CDs were released.\n"; } So "my $year = (split /\t/)[3];" knows that it's input parameter is a line from <FILE> it doesn't have to told. The [3] obviously says give me the 4th element in the tab delimited line. The $_ var is well documented. Again the minimal code approach is challenging for me. And this can probably condensed even more ?! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/