Re: need help extracting words from a string

[Felix Geerinckx]

on Tue, 20 Aug 2002 16:22:31 GMT, Jessica wrote:

> I am attempting to extract a two words or fields from every line of a
> tab delimited file. Sometimes the words that I need are in fields 1 &
> 2 and other time they are in 2 & 3. The lines look something like
> this: 
> 
> TypeOfApp    ApplicationName     RunStatus
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> application     run_me_now      complete
> application2   ran_me_yesterday     complete/errors       
> need_to_run_tomorrow     failed                      
> 
> I am in need of just extracting the ApplicationName and RunStatus
> from the lines and placing them in variables so that I can do things
> with them. 
> 
> I think I'm smart enought to know how to get the file opened and get
> the lines into a while loop like so: 
>
> open (FILE, ./datafile);

Unfortunately, this is not the case:

You forgot to turn on warnings and strictures.
You didn't quote your filename.
You didn't check the return value of the open-call.


Try this:

    #! perl -w
    use strict;

    open FILE, './datafile' or die "Could not open file: $!";

    while (<FILE>) {
        chomp;

           # skip blank lines and column headers        
        next if /^$/;
        next if /^---------/;
        next if /^TypeOfApp/;
        
        # keep last two fields
        my ($when, $result) = (split ' ')[-2,-1];
        print "$when: $result\n";
    }


-- 
felix

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