John Fitzgerald wrote:
> Hi, I'm fairly new to Perl, and trying to do a simple
> operation on a text file exported from excel.
> ID Enrolled Extraneous Columns....
> 3008 05-Aug-03
> 3008 05-Aug-03
> 3008 05-Aug-03
> 3008 05-Aug-03
> 3008 24-Sep-03
> 3009 11-Aug-03
> 3010 19-Nov-03
> 3010 11-Jul-03
> 3010 11-Jul-03
> 3010 11-Jul-03
> 3011 15-Jul-03
> As you can see, the dates for a given ID are
> different. What I need to do, is set the dates all to
> the earliest date for that ID (client-birth date). The
> other columns are are important, but don't factor in
> here. I'd appreciate any help. Thanks -John
Why are you trying to throw information away? You are not really
specific about what you want to achieve, here, but this doesn't
make a whole lot of sense. If you are trying to find the earliest
date that a given ID was reference you can simply take the first
and ignore the rest.
open FIRST, 'first.txt' or die "Couldn't open first access: $!";
my $line = <DATA>;
my $id = '';
while (defined $line) {
if ($line =~ /^(\d+)\s+(\S*)/) {
if ($1 ne $id) {
$id = $1;
my $date = $2;
print FIRST "$id $date\n";
}
}
$line = <DATA>;
}
It could be that this is all the information you want to extract.
If so, this should do it. Otherwise, you might think about tacking
on some type of GUID [possibly auto-numbering] to identify each
line item. Each one probably represents some unique information,
anyway.
Joseph
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