> -----Original Message----- > From: Paul Kraus [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2002 2:00 PM > To: Perl > Subject: Snagging the last page of a report > > > Every month I have several reports I print to disk. They are > hundreds of > pages long. I only need the last page of each. As it is now I > open it in > a text editor scroll down and copy the last page to a new > text document. > This is irritating and I want to play with the Perl I have been > learning. > > How can I snag the last page of something. > > I could do a search to find end of file (I think you can do that with > reg expr).
No, regexes are for searching strings. The seek() function can be used to position the pointer at the end of the file. > Then if somehow I could have it report the position of the > file the EOF occurs I could then somehow count back to the > first part of > the page then ummm well you see my confusion. Any help and suggestions > are appreciated. All though a solution would definitely solve > my problem > it wouldn't be fun at all :) The trick is to find whatever delimits the last page. It might be as simple as an ASCII formfeed (12) character. In general, you would seek to EOF, then back up a "reasonable" page size (say 2kb) and read a block of data. If you find the start of the last page, you're good. If not, back up another 2k and try again. > > However if I could get some hints or be pointed at some > relevant info I > would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance. There's a File::ReadBackwards module on CPAN that might be helpful. It handles all the file pointer manipulation for you. You could just read lines backwards into an array until you find the first line of the page. Then print reverse(@myarray) to print the last page. If the files were small, you could suck the whole file into a single string and extract the last page using a regex. But for big reports that's a bad idea... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
